Recently I discovered a local newspaper was publishing my blog content on their site. At first I was pumped but when I took a look at the page where they were syndicating my content, I quickly noticed that they were publishing my entire feed! Doing so actually ends up hurting both the news site and my blog as it creates two copies of my content, which can potentially lead to duplicate content penalties from Google.
I was getting ready to send off a nice e-mail to the site’s web-master to ask them to utilize my post excerpt feed instead, when I realized that I don’t list the address for my post excerpt feed anywhere on this site! So, to resolve that issue and hopefully make it easier for publishers to find and publish my content excerpt feed I’ve placed the address in my sidebar. Though I welcome any and all publishers who wish to spread the word of the Prose of a Pol, note that I reserve the right to request that you take down my content if you are using it on a spam site or in any way doing something nefarious with it. To 99% of the people out there (who are not spammers), you’re good and can go ahead and use my post excerpt feed without worry, it’s simply a precaution (and a warning!) against spammers.
If you have any questions on this policy, drop me an e-mail.
That’s the problem with publishing an RSS feed…
You make your content available to everyone, to do with as you wish.
True, Stu. However, my content is copyrighted and thus I reserve the right to tell people to take it down if they are abusing it. Just because I publish an RSS feed does not give everyone carte blanche to rip my content and do with it as they wish. So far, I haven’t had too many abusers and when I do find a spam blog, I notify them to stop posting my full content and usually they comply.
And in this case, it was purely a mistake. I’d set up an aggregator for a future project just to make sure it would work, not thinking somebody would notice the feed request in their logs, but planning to trim the feeds before the page went live.
Adam Gaffin´s last blog post..Troglodytes walk among us
Yup, and just to clarify by no means was I referencing the site Adam G. is working on as the spam blog. Adam’s unbelievably awesome universalhub site and the other site not yet to be named are both great resources for readers, bloggers and the citizens of Boston.
Spam blogs (usually hosted by blogspot.com or a similar free service to avoid being contacted) are ones who publish zero unique content and cover their site with ads and pull other people’s content, sometimes without even linking back to the source! Those are the ones who I threaten with the copyright notice.
For the site Adam G. is working on I asked if they could shorten my feed, which they did very, very quickly. They even apologized several times even though I wasn’t upset! I was actually very excited by seeing that site publish my feed, just wanted to give them a heads up that Google would probably prefer excerpts (though I’m checking with Matt Cutts, but believe he’ll likely agree that excerpts are preferable in Google’s eyes). It’s amazing how much control one search engine has over the whole web.
P.S. I hope this post/policy didn’t come across as too pretentious or anything like that. I just figured it was a good idea to put it in writing so I can reference people in the future to it. Plus, it gives me one more tool for fighting spam blogs, which helps everyone (well, nearly everyone, obviously hurts those silly spammers, which is good for all of us).