When you’re new to blogging, you have a lot of different voices clamoring at you with competing messages about what gets results. Basically, there’s a high road and a low road. Another way to look at it is you can earn your results… or you can cheat. What I want to do identify some tactics people are using and talk about their ethical implications. I’m throwing down for the high road. Here we go:
Watch video on YouTube: Blogging Ethics 101a - Feed Aggregation and Scraping
Blog Feed Aggregation and Scraping
Aggregating feeds is fine as long as it’s clear that’s what you’re doing. Better if you have permission from the original content creators. Aggregating industry-related news is an ethical and perfectly legitimate content strategy for a business blog.
Scraping feeds is taking content without permission and presenting it as if it were your own, or as if you had written a post whose only real content is a large quote from another blogger’s feed. This is often the basis of splogs, which are blogs filled with stolen content, usually as a means to show Google AdSense. Although scraping is highly unethical, I have way better things to do with my time than complain about scrapers. They’re just a fact of life. Sometimes, even scrapers are funny.
8 Comments
Sometimes they even push up your Technorati ranks.
Just wanted to say thanks and I love your blog. It is great for new bloggers like me! Thanks.
I’ve got a few websites that scrape my content. Not sure what to do about it, but it’s annoying.
Install RSS Footer (wordpress plugin)
@ esvl - That does nothing to stop scrapers. And they can parse that kind of content and remove it.
Just thought I’d share it. Helps me. I get 100’s of backlinks from splogs because my url is in there.
@ esvl - Gotcha. I think I may have misunderstood your comment: I thought you were suggesting that RSS Footer would help deter scrapers. My bad!
In that case, then, it’s a great suggestion, for the reason you say: increases backlinks!
I had an experience like that on the tutorial that I’ve written some guy made a post with the tutorial steps rearranged…