Scraping your feeds?
posted in tips, zen |I’ve been receiving a number of track-backs from other sites that scrape my site for content.
Essentially, they’re pulling in the first x amount of words and posting it as “blah blah had a great post: _insert_my_content_ read more here _link to my site_”
Now, should I be mad at this? There are two ways to look at this.
- They are stealing my content - but sometimes they ARE linking back to me - and without any filtering rel tags.
- They’re making money off of me - they have ads plastered all over their site, which essentially means they’re aiming at the suckers who click through on their ads instead of checking out the article (potentially getting *my* advertising money).
To be totally honest, I’m not sure whether I should lay the proverbial smack down on them - filing DMCA takedown notices (technically, some of them are citing me, and linking to me). What I see on a MAJORITY of blogs nowadays are just that - citations and links. Full of the occasional opinion posts - but even more full of “here’s my links of what other people wrote about Personal Finance” and in turn, those links tend to have people linking back and forth - and usually to the same article.
I guess the trade off from a scraper is I’ve got that many more links pointing at me - as long as I’m not the one setting up the spam sites to begin with. Anyone have any experience with scrapers? What have you done (or not done)?
