AutoBlog question?

I've used WP Robot as the primary content generator in the past with very little success. It did get traffic to my site based on where I was pulling the content from. I've used the article generator and got nothing. However, when using the Yahoo answers, Youtube and Amazon content generators, I got quite a bit of traffic. With that said, I got ZERO sales and barely any clicks on CPAs or Adsense to be worth my time. Something like about $10 in a four month period... LOL.

I've changed my strategy since then and only use WPRobot on the back end of a few sites to add content for videos and adding Amazon products. My reason is to provide additional content that may help my visitors with what they're looking for. The videos add additional outside help with their search and the Amazon products provide them with more than what I've used to monetize my primary pages with. It does work for me and I'm thinking of creating a few videos to show others how to do it.

I don't use WPRobot to provide my primary content!!! I learned that this is a dead end road and I don't want to go down that road again. Tested and failed! I'm not sure if it was due to the content being duplicated or not, but I do know that it just didn't seem to be as valuable in the eyes of my visitors. And that's what counts. I now create my own unique content because it works better.

I can't answer your ebay question, I haven't used ebay for years.

As for Hostgator, I was using the baby package at the same time I was using WPRobot without any problems, so I'm not sure if you should be concerned there.

The only advice I can give from my own experience is that auto generated content should only be used as a 'secondary' or 'back-end' content source. You should focus on providing unique content so your visitors will be better quality and possible buyers. Just speaking from my own experiences with my niche site adventures.

Hope this helps.

Yes, you're right: it's syndicated content, not duplicate content.

That doesn't mean that it has any significant SEO advantages for the people syndicating it.

"SEO benefits" are not the purpose or objective of syndicating others' content (or at least, if they're the intended purpose, it's not a purpose that's often going to be fulfilled).

You'll need legal advice, there. I'm no lawyer but it sounds to me like you may be describing what a court would call "derivative works", so you should certainly be very careful indeed about that, as those are clearly a form of plagiarism.

Articles in article directories, for example, may be republished/syndicated in their entirety, with the author's resource-box included, and so on (subject to the directory's TOS, of course) - indeed, that's what they're there for. But they may not be changed/edited/re-written.

I don't know the answers to your second and third questions.

Open disclosure: call me a skepchick, but my own personal bias is that I think autblogging is largely a nonsensical waste of time and not really a serious business model at all, apart perhaps from "for the people selling the software/services involved".

I would leave the autoblogging alone. Especially if you're trying to do it to make money from Adsense. Google doesn't like this. Start a nice website or blog around a hungry niche, update it with content everyday, and market it everyday. You'll stay out of trouble and will more than likely earn more this way.

Autoblog is a content killer and will ultimately lead you in to trouble. so the best way is to get somebody to write content for you fro your blog which is a better option and will at least deliver some useful and original material to your blog visitors.

WP Robot is a little like any other 'bulk' software in that there are a few legitimate uses for it and a plethora of 'black hat' ones. Primarily it is used for black-hat purposes and since it leaves a very clear FOOTPRINT for Google, you use it at your own peril.
I have utilized it to feed youtube videos into a Vids category on a large community website and it was a great asset. Obviously with youtube it's pulling in content which is freely shared and it keeps community members on the website without sending them off to youtube. So in that way it's a useful resource and no rules are being broken. In a similar way I use it to update a Job Fair listing on a popular employment site. This is via permission granted through an API so the listings are meant to be used this way.

There are many other potentially perilous uses, including API hookups for spinning software which automatically spins the content before reposting, and affiliate link cloaking for Amazon products. But you'd need to know how to remove the footprint before venturing down any of those paths. Better to stay away IMHO