Today I was doing a little hunting on Google’s Blog Search (which I love) and noticed that someone on wordpress.com had wholesale ripped off our story on the best way to set up your feeds with Feedburner. The funny part is I found them because the text of the story talks about how we did our particular set up and mentions slicksurface.com which made the stolen story easy to find.

It’s one thing to republish the story, after all RSS = Real Simple Syndication and syndication is all about republishing things. But when you do that you’ve gotta at least put a link back to the authoritative source for the material, which this person didn’t do. With the link you’re giving the original site some “link love”, without the backlink you’re causing duplicate content issues for them.

So, I’m hunting around wordpress.com looking for how to file a DMCA complaint and can’t find the form to fill out. Their support form makes it really clear that it only exists to support their clients. So I put in the blog in question under “my blog” to get past the automated script that won’t let you submit the request unless the blog is on WordPress.

Maybe an hour later I get a response which is just about perfect - 1) they took down the site, and 2) they tell me where to go to submit WordPress DMCA complaints. Bravo, thumbs up, cheers, etc… That’s exactly how it should be handled. Danny Sullivan was right when he said WordPress was doing well with spam.

I should also mention that once again I saw again how on top of things the folks at Feedburner are. They had found the spammy blog post within a day, read it, and posted a comment asking how the blogger could have possibly done what the post said given that the person was on WordPress which doesn’t let you do any of what the post talks about. Too bad I can’t buy stock in Feedburner - they seem like an incredible company…

Tags: Blogging, duplicate-content, Feeds, RSS
Categories: Blogging, Duplicate Content