Tuesday, September 23, 2008

More unethical syndication of my blog

It's happened again, another company is abusing the works of CF bloggers for their own benefit.

They call themselves "Internet Marketing Experts" but others would call them freeloaders or unethical cheapskates. There is nothing wrong with traditional aggregator sites, such as cfbloggers or the planet style sites like planet osgeo

Whilst googling up on the use of Malcom Turnbull's new nick name Truffles , I found this link when I searched for truffles emo, the first link was mine and the second was this unattributed rip off

This is blatant content stealing, not properly attributed and should not be indexable by search engines. They have a lot of CF bloggers on there as well.

There is no excuse for this. Period, no discussion. If your smart enough to program a website, you should be smart enough to realize that this is wrong, really wrong.

I know people are hard pushed for idea's, but writing yet another blog aggregation site and then SEO-ing it to compete with the original authors site's is really scraping the barrel, dumb... Even McCain could understand that!

I am going to fire off a stern email to sales@f9group.com

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's funny-- I just found one of my blogs on that site while googling last night. I was thinking to myself, "Is this a new blog aggregator?" What was funny about the site was that they seemed to claim the content saying "come back, we update the site daily."

Zac Spitzer said...

one thing i really respect google ad words for, it that they make it really easy to report such stuff, you just have to click on the ad words logo and fill out the report via some simple check boxes

Unknown said...

Oh snap, they have me too!

Zac Spitzer said...

[#339373730] Google AdSense DMCA Complaint filed

I have heard back from the company and they claim to be doing no wrong and are happy to remove my content.

Syndicated rss content should not be indexable by search engines and should be presented with both the blogs name and linked back to the site.

It was suggested i shouldn't have a public RSS feed!

unfortunately it's not really ethical to publish the reply is it?

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I just went and looked at the site again. They do link directly to my blog post on my site so I don't know that I mind that much. I do wish they would put my name next to the title at least.

Zac Spitzer said...

looks like they took the whole CF section down...

what google had indexed was single pages which had no link whatsoever back to the original blog..

it's a shame to have one less CF blog aggregator out there, but it's not like we are lacking in choices either.

Anonymous said...

@Brad They claim that they display "both the author of the article and the Uniform Resource Locator back to the original article from which it was obtained." ;-)

@Zac Just yesterday they announced that they won't be aggregating CF blogs any more, the reason being that "The lack of RSS feeds with proper author information in them has forced us to make this decision."

I don't have enough knowledge about RSS ... so, could this be true? There is a way to publish the author in a RSS feed and most people just don't publish that information in their feed?

Anonymous said...

I guess you upset them! http://blog.f9group.com/technology/coldfusion/coldfusion-category-removed/