Caydel’s SEO Blog

Or so it was claimed to me the other day. Not necessarily your entire copyright, but certain protections within it.

I was speaking with some other webmasters the other day when the issue of scraping other site’s RSS feeds for content was brought up. We got to talking about the legality of this. I personally was surprised at some of the arguments put forward justifying, if only in a legal sense, the scraping of RSS feeds.

Since you are publishing your content via a public syndication channel, your RSS feed, you waive your right to disallow republication. In effect, you are giving away your content for people to do what they want with it, almost as if you had published it under a Creative Commons license.

Obviously, that is an undesirable interpretation of the purpose of RSS feeds - if it were so simple, I would cut it off entirely. Unfortunately, 90% of my regular readers are reading via RSS. If I were to stop publishing my RSS feed, I would likely lose a large precentage of my audience. And this interpretation must be wrong on another level - I am quite sure I would get sued if I were to take the content off of the feed of any big-name blog and republish it in a book. I doubt I would win.

So certain rights must be retained still when publishing an RSS feed containing your content.

Let’s take a look at this from a legal perspective.

When you are accessing the RSS feed on a website, you naturally would assume that there is a certain implied license to the data. It would be fair to assume (and legally defensible) that the owner who made the feed available intended that you be able to add the feed to Bloglines, Google Reader, or another similar aggregator.

This is where the implied license idea breaks down. A scraper could easily claim that he is ‘another similar aggregator’. He is doing a fairly similar job to Bloglines and Google Reader; he is taking your data, and aggregating it in a single place for readers. His layout may not be useable, and the purpose of the site may only be to raise Adsense money, but in effect, when using your data, he is considering himself just another aggregator.

This means that the implied license idea does virtually nothing to protect your data from aggregators, even if you do not yourself want them to use your data.

So how can we make undesirable resyndication illegal?

The best recourse currently available is to specify on your blog what rights or license is granted to the content within your feed. As to where this license must be placed, well, that is another question. Should it be on a seperate page? Under the ‘Syndicate’ link? Within the feed itself? This in itself could have legal implications - the legal best method would be to make someone explicitly agree to your terms via a double-confirmation form prior to accessing your feed, or even learning the location of it.

Any license should contain an explicit, enumerated list describing who is allowed to access your feed, for what purpose, and under exactly what conditions they may use your content. Do not leave any grey areas.

So what? People are still going to scrape my content!

Undoubtedly. However, depending on how important it is to you, this will go a long ways to firming up your legal footing in case you decide to take action against unauthorized resyndication. I would hope that people take this matter seriously - every time someone scrapes your content, you run the risk of losing ranking for the terms contained within the content. While Google does a certain amount to filter out these ‘webspam’ sites, they aren’t perfect.

Related Link: ghostwriter ought to be careful, as RSS feeds can waive your copyright.

Share This

Has anyone else noticed an increase in referral spam in the last two weeks? I am seeing almost 500 referral spam hits per day, with more somedays. This is particularily annoying to me since I am using Dax’s referral RSS feed in order to keep an eye on my referrals… this recent trend is making that more or less useless now!

I wouldn’t mind some input from comment spammers - how effective is comment spamming? What kind of a return do you get on it?

At any rate, back to your regular scheduled programming….

Share This

I just got word that David Ogletree, SEO & site marketing guru, will be on Greg Niland’s (GoodROI’s) Good Karma radion show on Webmasterradio.fm at 4:00PM EST/3:00PM CST today. Both David and Greg have a lot of great ideas for your sites, so I would encourage all of you to listen in! One of the topics for the show will be Windows Vista Gadgets, and what they can mean for your site!

If you are listening and want to get the most out of the experience, I would also suggest you join the live Webmasterradio.fm chat so you can send questions to the host, and interact with other members. See you there!

Share This

Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man - wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

• Blogging and social networks - People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.
• Branding - Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.
• Affiliate Marketers - can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list - one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

Share This

Akismet is telling me that it has now successfully blocked over 5000 spam messages posted to my blog. It feels like just yesterday I broke the 100 spam mark - it took three months of blogging before I got to that point. Three months later, I broke 1000, and now, three months after that, I have broken the 5000 spam mark.

I have decided to commemorate this grand occasion with a poorly-written haiku:

Akismet Haiku
Akismet is cool
it happily blocks my spam
without bad failure

Share This

Who would have guessed that one of the best ways to spam Yahoo would have been spamming Google?

Earlier today, Barry Schwartz posted on Search Engine Roundtable about the phenomena where Google is ranking well in the Yahoo UK SERPS for the phrase “Buy Viagra”. Sure enough, when I checked the results for myself, in the Yahoo UK SERPS, for ‘Buy Viagra’!

A little deeper research into the matter indicated quickly where the source of this is quickly apparent. Perform a quick search on Yahoo for the phrase ‘buy viagra’ while constraining the search to the Google.com domain.

The first thing you will probably notice about the 37 SERPS returned is that there are a bunch of pages written up in full of pill-spam. These notebook pages are full of non-nofollowed links pointing to further spam sites.

This is extremely ironic, considering how Google pushes the NOFOLLOW tag to be used for user-generated content. Perhaps they should look at what they are allowing people to post on their domain?

Examples:

Secondly, there are a number of attempts to gain links through Google redirects, which are indexed by Yahoo!. This generates more non-nofollowed links on the Google.com domain. Again, ironic lack of NOFOLLOW tags on Google’s part…

Examples:

Lastly, there are various other pages linked in there, such as the Zeitgeist, a CSE for viagra purchases, and a link to Google trends.

Now, I highly doubt that there are thousands of sites out there linking to Google with the anchor text ‘buy viagra’. As a result, I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that the main thing propelling Google near the top of the ‘buy viagra’ SERPS in Yahoo would be these keywords on Google’s sites.

Building off of this, I would suggest that Yahoo places an unbelievably high value on the Google.com domain. Since the fact that those keywords only appear on 37 seperate pages on the Google domain was enough to push Google.com quite high in the Yahoo.com SERPS, I suspect that if one was to load as many pages on the Google.com domain (thinking of Google Base and Google Notebook, in particular), it would be possible without too much effort to rank for competitive terms in Yahoo.

I await your thoughts on the matter!

** Hat Tip to David Naylor