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….
If you are looking to aggregate content on your site in auto-pilot, there is one program that I would suggest and that is AutoBlogged because it works. Get the multiple site, because you will very likely use it on more than one site!
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.
Elliot Silver
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.
Mak Ossa
This is a rampant issue and there should be a better way for original writers to fight off bloggers who are lifting content off people’s work without credit or link-backs.
Elliot Sliver discussed some thing similar on his blog sometime ago, and I really learnt a lot from that post. When someone mentioned Copyscape.com, I used their search to find out that some celeb blog have been stealing my content (words to words). Then I sent a “stop and desist notice”; though the bloggers complied but I still find this unscrupulous act disturbing. Before I write, I usual take time to research and analyze reports I have; but it is too bad that too many vultures are out there surfing the web by any means to copy writings without giving you cred.
Seyi
Hi Jamie: You really need to take on this guy. I just checked the site. He really got you words for words with no link back or your name credit. He even has the gut to post this “very post”. You are not the only one being milked there. He has Domaintools, Rick Latona and others. To add injury to the salt, he even imitated some of your blog design. This ridiculous.. Some other sites such as DNHour that does this gives some linkbacks which this aggregate blog can easily do too..
owen frager
I agree with Elliot who has some excellent posts on the matter, even though he outranks me every time he discusses me
Seriously though, look at the most successful site on the web- Drudge Report. In the beginning the NY Times and others wanted to sue him. Now they rely on his traffic. It’s knowing how to play those legitimate aggravators to your advantage that makes for a mutually beneficial relationship.
Appleinvestornews.com and domaining.com are two aggregators who have established such a relationship with our blog.
btw, Rohit has a great blog post on credit and link etiquette” “The right and wrong way to steal my stuff”
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2008/06/the-right-and-w.html
**Jamie Says**
Thank you Owen for the links, I will check them out. You have to love that line… “The right and wrong way to steal my stuff” LOL
owen frager
Ps- this is also helpful:
http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/take-it-back-100-tips-to-defeat-content-thieves/
Rido
@Elliot Silver it is funny to recommend to file a DMCA complaint for . Not understand also, what exactly will hurt rankings on Google. Are you think google is too stupid?
- You write article
- Someone noted your writing to his blog site with back link to original source
- Google finds and indexes both sources
- Analyzing the sources will find that the original and more important is your article because the other source is to short and LINKS to your source. Also, you receive 1 free back link to your site, I hope you know what means back links to your site, looked at SEO side.
Another funny think is that, I come and found this blog from adamdicker.com. After reading the full article looked back at adamdicker.com and just found that there are also many more postings linking here.