If you own a blog or develop sites, you know what Aggregate is. The easiest way to look at it is, one site owner taps your feed to your blog and via settings decides what feed(s) or postings to pull from your site and post on theirs. (domaining.com is a well know site that use this.)
Then your hard work get’s zapped onto their site instantly with little to no work involved. Is this good or bad?
It depends on the orginal poster really. For me, I could care less that somebody is grabbing my material that I write, as long as the site is "legal" and helps people and links back to me. The reason I spend my time writing on my blog is for people to read and learn etc. I do not only want my postings on their site so they make money….
Google likes Unique content and that’s what I do. 99.8% of things I write, I come up with. So is my content unique when it get’s to the other site? No.
The things that I do see important, is Getting Linked Back, so people can visit the original posting (your site) and give proper credit when credit is due. Not just a: posted by admin. I want to see, From DotWeekly.com or posted by Jamie Zoch of DotWeekly.com etc.
I contacted DotEasyDomains.com who aggregates from DotWeekly and nicely asked that he add: Source, DotWeekly.com and link back. When I contacted him, it was clear he was doing this with Many sites and asked "which site". So now I block or delete most pingbacks since it was never fixed and I have to manually edit each pingback and not another reply back from the owner!
Now the site owner can set the aggregater to grab your feed, but also not to pingback. That part ticks me off! Your not linked back and the parts of the story they post on their site can be taken out of context or what ever, plus as the original poster you can not track this back. I also use the code "<!–more–>" which puts a Read More and cuts the story off, which will normally screw up the aggregater grabber and only grab the posting To that code.
If you aggregate, be sure to ask the site owner FIRST before you do it. Secondly, link back to the original story and give proper credit.
File a DMCA complaint with that person’s host and they will be forced to remove it. I’ve found that most of the sites that do it have no PR and don’t send any traffic. That means it isn’t doing anything for you, and it may be hurting your ranking if Google penalizes for duplicate content. Most of the time the owners of the sites are using the aggregate feeds because they are either lazy or don’t want to put the effort into building a site. IMO, it’s leaching.
It’s one thing if someone correctly analyzes your post or references your post trying to make their own points. It’s another thing when someone takes your content and repackages it without your permission. That isn’t cool nor is it legal, and there are ways to stop it.
**Jamie Says**
Thank you Elliot. I will look into the DMCA and file it.
June 24th, 2008