Should We Care About People Stealing Content Via RSS Feeds?
I’ve had full text RSS feeds on my blogs from day one. I’ve justified why and I stand by that justification still. Recently there has been a lot of discussion circulating around the blogosphere about people stealing content from RSS feeds. Since feed are so easy to use it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a way to automatically replicate blogs by using RSS.
For a while now I’ve watched my Technorati referral statistics and it’s becoming more and more common to find blogs replicating some of my articles or even replicating all of my articles. They don’t ask for permission and use the content either by copying and pasting or by using an RSS feed scraper which automatically republishes content from RSS feeds of other blogs.
Initially I was bit surprised and angered, especially when I came across a site which blatantly republished all of my articles creating a near-duplicate of my recent content. I’ve shot off a few emails to such sites asking for them to remove my content but somehow I don’t think an email will be enough to get my desired response.
How This Hurts
My biggest concern, and I’ve already noticed this once, is that my search engine rankings will be affected. While I’m confident that it won’t be me that gets the duplicate content penalty since I have so many authority links coming in to my site (it should be the rip-off artists that get the penalty, but you can never be sure), I have noticed at least one instance where a clone of my site has ranked just below my own page in the search engine results page for a particular high-value keyword.
But Does It Really Hurt?
A few weeks ago I woke up to the usual list of emails telling me about each new person who has subscribed to my blog promotion tips newsletter. I check each of these emails to see which sites people are joining up from. This particular morning one of the referrers was from a site that was not mine. The blog clone had recruited a newsletter subscriber for me!
Of course it depends exactly how other people are ripping off your content, but in this case when the culprit is using an automatic RSS publishing tool it republishes my content EXACTLY how it appears, which means it includes all my affiliate links, links back to my site and links to my newsletter. This duplicate site may be stealing my content, but it’s also helping to make sales for me, sign-up newsletter subscribers and bring new visitors back to my site. It’s hard to complain about that.
Overall of course I don’t like people using my content without asking for permission first, but at least it’s not all bad.
Yaro Starak
Blog Content Thief Victim
