Another Blogger Against Green Eggs and Ham
Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Just weeks after Barbados Butterfly reported that her content was being stolen and republished without her permission in her post "I do not want green eggs and ham", I come to find out that The same thing has happened to me. An "Aquatic Cabinets" company has syndicated posts (Don't worry folks - the one place on my site where the link includes rel="nofollow") from my Scuba Diving category onto their site. I have no problem with people syndicating my feeds (that's why they are there), but I have established rules as to how the feeds can be used, and those rules need to be followed. The license under which the content on this site is released specifies that it may not be used for commercial purposes. I have reiterated that in the disclaimer for those not able to comprehend the extremely simplistic license. Links to both are on the bottom of every single page, making them pretty hard to miss, if one were to adhere to common courtesy at all. BRI Aquatic Cabinets is obviously using the feed in a commercial manner. They have also syndicated every single post from the largest scuba-related internet message board onto their site. What's the purpose of all this? Fool search engines into thinking that the site is more important than it really is, thus raising the site's rank in the search engine's results (which theoretically brings in more customers to the site –> commercial.)
I have emailed the admin of the site to remove my feed, but so far no response. No worries though, I have blocked the web server the site is hosted on, so theoretically it won't be able to get any more posts, just constant 403: Forbidden errors.
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Apologies for missing your disclaimer. We do look for them, but sometimes they get missed.
The feed was removed as you requested. We host many different feeds that our clientele find interesting. Our product is a upscale item and many of the hobbyist have other interest such as diving. Sure the feeds help with search indexing for different topics. But all of the topics we host are items that apply to our customer base and gets a lot of use by them. And I assure you the effort to maintain the feeds is not worth the effort in a “sales” sense. We do it for fun. We happen to not only like what we do, but do it better than any one else in the market and go to great lengths to be unique in every way. And it is apparent to any one the site is not maintained or built by a professional webmaster. We do it for fun. Heck, I have never even bothered to get business cards or go to a trade show to promote our cabinetry. Don’t have to. They promote themselves by their quality.
No where on the site does it mention buy our products. Call our shop, the answer machine will tell you to call a pet store. Unlike most people and or companies, sales is not a problem for us, keeping up with them is. The site is as it says, a reference tool for our vendors. If some one wants to purchase, they must go to a pet store and place an order and wait. The products are strictly built to order, one beautiful cabinet after another. If someone is in a hurry, we are not the place to go.
Guess you did not read that. But no problem for us, we enjoy top listings in all search engines for our products- with or with out the feeds as shown by the new site in which all feeds were redone and any previous back links were dropped with no effort to “redirect”- and of course quite a bit of traffic. The rankings are based upon content and relevance. That is what gets you rankings. Not a bunch of feeds. Google does not give out top rankings for feeds. That is a myth. Content is the way to the top.
Most people like yourself enjoy the small amount of spin off traffic they receive from our sites, affluent people with good taste. We will take care not to insult you again. Enjoy the indexing you received from our popular name, how do you think I found this post? Because I was worried about you?
Sincerely,
bobby
Thank you for removing the feed. I appreciate your response, and understand your position, but I really feel that it is still my right to determine if I wish my site to be associated with a site selling products (even if you do have to click a few back-links), even when publishing an RSS feed. Thanks for the offer of site traffic, but I really don’t need it. I mean, I don’t have any ads on here, and if I was worried about ratcheting up that hit counter, I would work harder at producing better, funnier content.
As I have said before, it would seem to me that the polite thing to do would be to ask before taking, i.e. use of content that may fall outside the license.