Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2010. The statement that Google has no effective system to fight content scraping reflects that month. Google rolled out algorithm changes against scraper sites and content farms in early 2011 (Panda).
Those of you who subscribe will already have noticed that, from now on, only part of each post will appear in your feed reader, and to read the full article you’ll need to visit the blog. We have taken this step because of the widespread copying, theft and plagiarism of our content that we are currently suffering. After talking to several bloggers who specialize in “anti-copy” measures, they all agreed on the same thing: sadly, there is no measure that can prevent it.
So they recommended that I cut the feed content. This won’t stop people from copying us, but it will stop them from copying everything automatically, and they’ll have to do it by hand.
These are the so-called autoblogs, planet blogs or “jerk blogs”, which feed themselves and assemble their content as the websites they subscribe to publish new posts.
We’re sorry to have taken this step, which I hope will be temporary until we can use other kinds of measures.
The irony is that, right now, you may be reading this on a blog other than this one.
I know this isn’t an isolated case and that a great many bloggers are going through the same situation, which can sometimes be maddening. In the end, the ones who lose out are the readers and the web in general, which fills up with duplicate content.
To this day, Google has no effective system to fight this. Let’s hope it surprises us with a solution soon.
Yet another example of how, in any business or world, real or virtual, there are people who play dirty, and you always have to stay alert and make the right decisions.
Featured image: Nsxbln, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
