Business Blogging Ethics: Don’t Steal!!
June 3, 2008 by Liz Fuller
Filed under Social Media
One of the challenges of blogging is coming up with frequent, relevant and high quality articles. Some blogs get around this particular challenge by scraping content on related blogs and putting those posts on their own blog – with no attribution, no link back, no credit…nothing.
Stealing another person’s words this way is bad for your blog and bad for your business. It is also illegal.
Recently, Laura’s and my posts have been scraped regularly by another blog. This is not a legitimate business blog – it is actually a spam blog set up just to get page rank.
Since this is an automated blog rather than a real one with a person or business behind it, there is no way to comment or send an email – and nothing we can do to get them to stop.
If this is happening to you, the only option you have is to put a link back to your blog at the beginning of your text and hope that they at least pick that up. Laura and I will be more consistent about doing that in the next few weeks and see whether it diminishes.
There are legitimate ways to include articles written by other authors in your blog – in an upcoming post I will discuss how to do that legally and ethically.
I don’t want to give a link to this illegitimate blog but in case you are curious to see a spam blog you can type in www(dot)blogstrings(dot) com.
I’m curious – has this ever happened to you? What have you done about it?
I see the same thing at the Middle Zone, but don’t have any idea what can be really done.
Daniel offered this idea this morning, though – a new wordpress plugin that does what you suggest.
Thanks for writing this Liz! I’ve noticed the scraper too. I’ll definitely add the link to our blog back in to the beginning of my posts.
Hi Robert
Thanks for the plugin! We’ll see about using it.
Liz
Hi Laura
It’s really frustrating – hopefully adding the link in will help. Can’t wait to find out!
Liz