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19/07: RSS Feeds And Content Scraping

The advent of RSS feeds has perhaps been both a boon and a curse for webmasters and internet users. The ability to distribute content quickly and easily has to be a great thing for site owners, and in turn has made it far more accessible and simple to organize for internet users. 

As with so many internet technologies however, RSS also has the ability to cause a lot of bad blood because it makes "stealing" other people's content so much easier. Indeed there have been, and will continue to be, many unscrupulous people quite prepared to use RSS not only to steal content but also to profit from it. There are plenty of  website owners up in arms about this, viewing it as outright theft.

Should you be worried about theft via RSS? Well, it depends entirely on your views. If your website or blog publishes a feed, it is very simple for others to use that feed and publish your content on other sites around the web. If you don't want people to using it in this way there are some things you can put in place to try and prevent it happening. Firstly, you need to make it clear that unauthorized reproduction of your RSS feeds is prohibited. State this on your site or blog, somewhere near your feed icons, and use the term copyright. 

OK I hear you say, that's all well and good but thieves are unlikely to pay much attention and will probably still use my feed however they darn well please! You would be right of course, but it will deter some people from riding on the back of your content. If you're really unhappy about it, the simplest answer would be to opt out of RSS altogether, but really, that is not a practical or desirable step for most of us. 

However, before you get too protective of your feeds there is another way of looking at it. If others syndicate your feed, you could benefit from a good deal of extra traffic and free publicity, often from sources you never would have thought to try and tap into, and some you couldn't have done even if you wanted to. 

I am very fortunate to have gained permission from another publisher to syndicate some of their content on one of my sites. This allows me to publish some very relevant and worthwhile extra pages with almost no work on my part and hopefully benefits the feed's owner who gets more exposure and hopefully some extra traffic. The key thing here is "permission". Some sites readily encourage you to syndicate their content (article directories spring to mind here, but they are just one example) for the wider exposure for both themselves and their authors. Publishing feeds from a site that asks or suggests using them is not a problem. Then there are those who forbid any form of syndication - for these sites you should respect their wishes/rules. For allowing me to utilize some of their feeds I am very grateful to Linda Buquet the owner of the 5Star Affiliate Marketing Forums and Blog. (See our main page at TheCaymanHost for the resulting pages). 

Those who occupy the middle ground are a little more difficult. As a rule of thumb, always ask permission before scraping anyone else's feeds. Often you will receive a positive response. Sometimes the owners of the feed may request a little more information about where and how you plan to syndicate their RSS which is quite reasonable. Most will appreciate the courtesy of being asked first, even if they don't specifically forbid syndication by third parties. A little consideration goes a long way and the outcome will be a happier one for all concerned. 

If you are genuinely against your feeds being "abused" there is at least one Wordpress Plugin I know of which will allow you to insert a footer into each post on the feed itself. Here you can add whatever message you wish to convey or  include a link back to your site. It's effectiveness is limited by many things however, so it's not really a guarantee of protection. Often the scraped feed will only show the title and first few lines so a footer will often never be seen. Besides which, dodgy content thieves will often be accomplished enough to get around it with a little coding. If you would like to try it however, you can get a copy of the FeedFooter Wordpress Plugin here. 

In summary I still believe RSS feeds have more positive benefits than negative points for us all. Those who choose to behave as thieves may prosper in the short term but that's an annoyance we have to live with. My current stance on these things is this. My feed is not copyrighted and if  people wish to syndicate my ramblings I'm OK with them doing so provided they credit me and my site as the originator of the work. Those who do the decent thing and ask first will be rewarded with good karma :-) 

And, just in case you want to subscribe to one of our feeds here they are below.

TCH

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