I’m reviewing Yet Another Content Generator per the request of one of this blogs’ readers/commenters.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on this, if you can call reading blog posts and forum threads research, and here’s what I’ve read so far from people who have written and commented about it.
Many have tried, the successful ones don’t brag about it, and those who are just starting out with it blog about it….like I’m doing here but they don’t give updates and/or followup, but I promise I’ll do a thorough review here with case study and final review.
Those that blogged about Yet Another Content Generator did so mostly in 2007 and 2008. So it seems like this software has been around a while, and it is still around and they’re continually updating their software. Most recent update on one of their sites was as recent as 7-10 days ago.
- So, the software makers are still active.
- The forum moderator is pay attention to forum threads and posts and replying to emails
- …and so far that’s all I know about the service/business/people behind YACG, Yet Another Content Generator.
What is YACG?
It is a site building/content generation software tool that is download-able onto your computer and only has a one-time fee.
It scrapes, aggregates, and creates content then you can modify it for publication to sites you create. Sites built using the YACG software are commonly referred to as YACG sites.
NOTE:
I always get worried when I hear people asking,
“Anyone building YACG sites?”, or “Anyone building BANS sites?” for several reasons:
Important background information about building certain kinds of sites… like YACG sites, or the BANS (Build A Niche Store) sites that got auto-created and sent people to eBay auctions automatically.
Since most people never modified the templates for the BANS templated sites, all of these sites made for easily identifiable footprints and a lot of careless folks got their BANS banned, de-indexed, etc…
What makes YACG different from BANS is they have anti-footpint measures in place that allow you to use different, varying templates for your “auto-content sites”.
Just to show you the important of footprint detection, there’s a high-end high-cost service called War Chest Builder that builds Adsense sites and it, too allows the users to vary their site templates in order to vary the footprints.
What is a site footprint and how is it easily identifiable by the search engines?
Hard to say for me since I never had to worry about this, but one thing that is easily identifiable on a site is when you post at the same exact time of day, and the publishing intervals are scheduled, as if the content weren’t being published by humans.
Another thing to watch out for is having every piece of content on your site the same exact length as content seen elsewhere. In other words, when you have site content that is very similar in content structure (paragraphs, wording, length, fonts etc…) then you’re exposing yourself to the risk of being deemed a scraper site.
Some people say there’s no damage to pulling verbatim ezinearticles.com articles down to your site and properly republishing them, but you’d still have to make some changes to the on-page seo of sites using dupe content to see better benefits from doing that.
This is just a guess because like I mentioned before scrapers sites have never entered my realm of consciousness until now and I’ve never had to worry about it.
The search engines are intelligent, but are not mind-readers so with billions of pages to index it’s safe to say there’s ways to “beat” the footprints identification issues.
Part of how the footprints can be deemed as unique is to vary your themes used, vary the style of sites you build and how you monetize them (Adsense, Clickbank, CPAs etc..), vary the length of your content, and also to use several different sources of content to aggregate from, then amalgamate them into different chunks of aggregated text/content.
For instance, let’s say YACG pulls from wiki sites as one part of the aggregation content sourcing.
Another source could be EZineArticles, and another could simply be the searching, scraping, and pulling together of the top ten or twenty sites for content for a certain terms.
So let’s say we now have 20 sources to pull content from using YACG…
The content gets pulled in and you now have something to work with here
How this works, exactly, I don’t know since I haven’t bought the software yet.
This post is really just an introduction to YACG, Yet Another Content Generator and some background information on the history of these types of auto-site-builders.
The important thing to note about the “history” of these programs is that people will get sites banned if they’re not careful, if they’re not adjusting and modifying their templates, and if they start building links to their sites too quickly.
I use the same blog theme on most of my sites and they don’t suffer any footprinting damage because the content’s 98% unique, so avoiding the footprint identification isn’t really just dependent on using different themes, but it helps.
Ethical issues about content scraping
I do believe there are some ethical issues here about “stealing” other people’s content, but in my opinion this can be avoiding by linking to the sources so those sources get linked to as the source and receive a beneficial backlink. If you look at it/rationalize it that way, then you’re syndicating their content for them, for free kind of like what Unique Article Wizard users experience when they mass submit articles.
It never hurts to link to a top-ranked site for a certain term anyways, just remember to keep the linkjuice of your sites working in your favor and don’t link out too often.
More to come, I am joining as soon as I get a techie to build sites or rather, to use YACG to add content to some of my existing niche sites.