Automation; Good/Bad or just another tool in the box?

[SteveGerencser]

I'm curious to see what other people think about automating tasks.. In SEO we do a lot of repetitive work and there are times when this work can be automated.. First, do you think automated is acceptable or unacceptable in SEO, why??

Second, if you think automation is acceptable in SEO, then how much?? Where do you personally draw the line at too much automation?? Is doing certain types of research enough, or do you go all out and look at techniques involving one of the popular automation tools out there?? Or do you fall somewhere in the middle??

There are no right or wrong answers here, just a discussion about where the industry is going to be heading over the next couple years..

[Terry Van Horne]

Automation there are degrees of separation. Some automation is needed these days... and then what's automated? If I prepare a bunch of posts on Tumblr and que them on a schedule for publishing is that automation?

Some query spaces/industries I wouldn't consider unless I was automating... in that case is there risk there? Not as much cuz everyone is doing it. Gambling sites for example.

[williamc]

As you already know Steve, I am big on automation, but generally only in the sense it helps us do our daily work, not including such crap such as forum/comment spammers, etc. I have automated tasks such as proposal creation, contract development, ranking reporting, link reporting, link profile processing and graphing, etc. Without the tools I would be working 24 hours a day.

[weblover50]

The type of automation I do is just to reduce the workload. Without which I would be wasting a few more hours a day easily. It also helps me to perform other tasks better since I don't need to worry much about the work that's being done on auto-pilot.

[kgun]

Why should you not automate tasks where that is natural? Isn't that a central factor in evolution? Example: I want the pure number table of this

http://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/10000.txt

page printed on the screen and / or saved to a database.

Why should I not do it by this simple python

file = urllib.request.urlopen('http://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/10000.txt')
primes = file.read().decode("utf8")
my_primes = []
for i,line in enumerate(primes.split('\n')):
    if i > 3 and i < 1004:
        temp = ((int(item) for item in line.split()))
        for i in temp:
            my_primes.append(i)
print (my_primes)

code? It is more obvious when you wan't to strip more text and / or markup from a page / site. I think it is similar for SEO and almost any online business. Automate where it is natural like testing the whole SEO element of a site. There are already many such tools online, some better than others and some spammy. Avoid the last group by all means if you wan't a long life for your SEO or related business.