 Show stolen web content with Autoblogger
Thursday, 4 May 2006
The RSS syndication format is gaining rapid acceptance in the computing community. While blogs such as this one have always provided RSS content, the mainstream media are finally starting to catch on to the benefits RSS offers to the consumer.
While RSS will almost certainly kill email newsletters, it brings it’s own problems to website owners. As I’ve already mentioned, dodgy internet outfits are already using the RSS medium to steal content.
To make things even worse, outfits like Autoblogger Pro even claim to provide a “complete SEO system” with their $99 software. Apparently, this application “plugs into” the popular Wordpress Blog/CMS system and:
“Uses RSS to syndicate posts from any blog, or any RSS/XML enabled site into your own, allowing you to get content rich sites with a lot of text the search engines love to spider. The software is so easy to use that literally within minutes you will have a content rich, and search engine friendly site, within minutes of starting with Autoblogger Pro.”
According to the testimonials on the Autoblogger website, there are a number of these “new types of blogs” out there already using their product to show stolen content:
http://www.poptard.com/http://www.buyitordie.com/http://www.oblingo.com/http://www.fandangos.com/http://www.dontclickme.com/http://www.ps3vault.com/
So, this cheap piece of crapware allows you to steal entire articles from other websites and present them as your own? Is this ethical? Of course not. Sure, they provide a link back to the original article at the bottom but why would any visitor bother clicking on the link when the entire article (images included) is available right there and then?
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I'm of the opinion that if you want to syndicate my content on your site with proper attribution, by linking back to me, then by all means go ahead and do it. I’m a producer of content and I can only see the benefits of having my content in as many places as possible.
But Autoblogger takes a different and highly unethical approach. In fact, I'd say that what they do is probably illegal. Their "relinker" feature even allows them to change your links with whatever they want. And their "word changer" allows them to replace entire phrases in stolen articles to get around the fact that Google punishes duplicated content.
And to think they're using WordPress, a highly-respected publishing platform, to provide these piracy features. It's such a crime.
The same thing happened to me, please see here: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/82726