Does adding a blog to your site ie. www.sitename.com/blog assist in moving your site up google? Also does it help if the blog is auto updating?
A blog can surely help to get your website crawled more often. I'd stay away from auto generated content since it does not look natural and most likely will not be helpful for users.
very good question, i'd say it will help your over all search engine marketing effort if you post interesting and appealing content, and if you get to become a real voice in your community/niche.
A blog does help. But the question you should be asking yourself is if you have the time and dedication to write original content for the blog? If not, have you got the funds to outsource the writing? Otherwise, it's a really good idea to have a blog, being crawled more often than a static webpage!
Blogs are great if you keep posting every day. The reason is you will have more search power. We started a blog over a year ago kept with it and now we get over 100 hits per day from google. We haven't made a new post in 2 months. Plus because of linking structure it is my belief that Bing favors blogs...which may or may not be beneficial in the years to come!