I recently went to the web and was flabergasted to find my content on another website.
The nerve. Hell, its not an insult, its a damned crime. That's what it is. But what can I do about it?
Yep, there is Houseblogger totally housed on this other website.
Okay, I mention this only tongue in cheek to contrast a recent post about what is an ethical issue, perhaps a legal issue, and a marketing issue.
Now, we all know that Google and the other engines crawl/scrape our pages and sites to list them in the search engine index. That makes us happy, and is a large source of my clients and my income.
However, a recent post by the Phoenix Real Estate Guy about a splog (spam blog) post made me pause and reflect. The gist of his post was that a site scraped several posts off the Phoenix site and listed it on their site as a post. This is very common. However, other than the name itself, their was no link back to the Phoenix site.
Now, I started off bashing Google as doing the same thing to create a contrast. This is the inherant challenge with the web. Just like drug addicts,we are cool that the engines copy and do what they will with our sites.
Webmasters trade not just their copyright, but even personal information and datamining for possible leads. We are willing participants in what would amount to copyright infringement in the old world. However, we accept their intrusions for that sweet elixir called traffic. While the splog in affect does the same thing, and we call that criminal.
It is a complicated issue that a small post cannot answer, but I at least wanted to contrast from the "Phoenix' posting.
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