To Feed or Not to Feed
The umbrella of the RSS feed has been shown to be useful in promoting websites yet many domainers are stunned to find a ton of stealing is going on. Content stealing via RSS feeds can be as easy and cutting and pasting and also support a lot of spam identification of your ethical website’s domain for an email campaign. Hijacked url usage for spam campaigning is an ongoing problem. Hijacking RSS feeds have become a stealing offense.
Ever checked your hosting account inbox to find 21 pages f spam mail replies and responses? Using another domainer’s url can get a lot of people in trouble but only if the owner of the domain in violation knows what to do. And there are marketing and spam companies operating in a black hat mode who will never be accountable for one millionth of the spam they send.
When a webmaster for a black hat sites hijacks another webmaster’s original s content and putting it on their own site, they are committing online piracy. Even the inferred rights on any material at another website should be observed. The confusion over the pingback phenomenon has been noticed here and elsewhere.
When the TOS of domain protected or branded website state that the material is not to be reproduced without express permission, domainers pretty much mean exactly that. Newsreaders don’t let other newsreaders steal content. The webmaster has to set up the site to draw masked feeds without proper origin acknowledgement.
RSS feeds can be siphoned from third party websites who also fail to show proper credit. That does not mean the material did not originate at its own publishing website, however. Material published at a website is answerable to laws of slander and libel, and the republisher of this material does not carry that burden. Web journalism is intentionally clouded by many online site operators at this intersection between freelance writing and “warez”.
Webmasters can find their rogue content flying its flag on sites they never heard of. Googling the material or using Copyscape is the way to discover this hijacked content. Sending takedown letters is unpaid labor that takes time. Possible reparations might be to instruct SEO software to ignore sites and domain which employ this practice, but black hat operators know how to mask hidden or invisible content to browsers anyway.
Site publishers then take a chance that their custom authored original content will ever surface on websites or networks of websites in other languages (yet derive the SEO value thereto.) When phantom websites mine RSS feeds for keyword dense material to be siphoned via the feed, they know what they are doing. It is for the future of website development that webmasters must act together to prevent this practice from continuing.
Unless something legal and broadly observed is done to pressure violators of content and copyright TOS and make them respect source material and originating content producers, webmasters and contributors face the indirect allowance of theft by their very act of web publishing. And the ongoing effort to improve traffic and garner SEO value will be dissolved until such a benchmark is reached.
