At its core, my first impression of SocialRank niche websites was that it was little more than a WordPress splog scraping my content based upon keywords used and giving some kind of relevant or irrelevant ranking based upon some internal algorithm.

It is still my content appearing on a 3rd party site, in the same way as one of the millions of kubrik themed sites that just grab keyword based feeds from Technorati.

As I have said in the past, I license my content as GPL, so am quite happy for people to repurpose it, and hopefully if they provide a link a little traffic finds it’s way back to my site.

There is however one thing I absolutely detest

Don’t Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content

If you site contains no original content, if you are not entering the “blogging conversation”, I don’t want you to spam the hell out of me with trackbacks and pingbacks.
I sent an email to SocialRank to switch off the pinging, the pinging continued with my email box full of ping notifications. All I received in response to my email was an invite to their beta.

Would you join the beta of a company effectively hiting you with trackback/pingback spam?

I don’t see them anymore, I have told Spam Karma to blacklist them just like any of the other splogs.

On the other hand I read today an interview Ben did with SocialRank.

This seems similar to the Quechup debacle at the beginning of last month where an over enthusiastic viral referral system effectively destroyed the social network before it gained any traction. The first page of results in Google only mention negative things about Quechup – I assume they rebranded.

I never accepted an invite to Quechup, but I assume within the terms and conditions somewhere they gave some notification that when you provide your friend’s details, they would automatically send email invites. Thus the emails probably weren’t spam, and looking back through the few emails I received, were not to my knowledge in any way illegal, with a clear opt-out option, company details, a nice link through to a company privacy policy etc. In fact iDate who own Quechup issued a press release 2 weeks ago explaining the changes made to the feature to stop people making mistakes when inviting people.

I think the problem comes with people so used to how Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented these in my opinion quite dangerous address book sharing features, they assume every site works the same way, even if the other site actually had a similar but different feature well before LinkedIn and Facebook. The iDate press release mentions having this feature since 2005.

With SocialRank it is different. They are the ones filling my email box with pingback after pingback proclaiming that they scraped my content.

I don’t regard them as a stinking splog, they are still linking back to the original source with a followable link, but currently they are more annoying than Quechup invites just 1 month ago.

• Are people constantly ripping off your content?
• Do you feel powerless to defend your copyright?
• Is the battle against plagiarism taking up more and more of your time?

Maybe you are going about things the wrong way and should take some inspiration from Judo…

What is Judo?

Literally “the gentle way,” this ancient martial art (it’s origin is from jujutsu) makes use of the opponent’s strength to overcome him, thereby making it possible for a David to throw a Goliath. Kano Jigoro (the founder of the Kodokan style of judo) developed the art into what is now an international Olympic sport.
Cheddar Judo Club

The conventional approach you will see recommended on multiple blogs is you send the site owner email, issue a DMCA or report the site to Google Adsense if they are monetizing your content.

Unfortunately that is fighting an uphill battle that you have little hope of winning as the hydra can always grow new heads and many sites using your content don’t attempt to monetise it directly.

Active Syndication

Similar in concept to article marketing, I actively encourage the syndication of my blog content by licensing it as GPL.

If you understand how article syndication works you could look on rss syndication with permission or without as a form of article marketing.

You can benefit from the duplicate content that is scattered over the web as seeds of knowledge.

How To Benefit From Legitimate Syndication & Splogs

• Include lots of internal links within each of your blog articles – these can be manually inserted, or in the form of related links and tags at the end of each article.
• Ensure there is a link to the permalink of your article within the article content
• If someone asks for permission to syndicate your content, request politely that they include a link to each original article, and not to your domain in the credits.

How To Include A Permalink In A Feed?

I do it currently with a hacked version of my Disclosure Policy Plugin but probably a simpler solution for most people would be to use one of the following.

• Better Feed – this includes both %%posttitle%% and %%posturl%% options so you can add a SEO friendly permalink to your RSS feeds.
• Sig2Feed – Can be used to add a link back to your site, but that could be easily modified to include a permalink.
• ©Feed – provides support for adding a permalink to your feed
• Various Other Feed Copyright Plugins – Almost all feed copyright and advertising plugins can easily be modified to include a permalink to your original article

Rather than fight plagiarism, learn to use it to your advantage.

Quite often the sites using your content without explicit permission are gaining search engine traffic, but it is also likely that that is search traffic you wouldn’t have received anyway.
By providing links through to the source of knowledge, a percentage of that traffic you wouldn’t have received will be led back to your blog.

In the time you spend fighting plagiarism, and more often than not reading about it, and worrying about it, you could quite easily have written more content on your blog which will please your readers, encourage more legitimate links to your site, and ultimately gain you more additional links from all forms of syndication, whether they have explicit permission or not.

Picture Credits

Note: I don’t know of the best solution to include post permalinks within the content of RSS feeds on platforms other than WordPress.

I have read all 59 pages of this free report. It certainly isn’t junk, and it shouldn’t be ignored.

Mike Filsaime goes into great depths about how things are going to be changing in the Internet Marketing arena in the coming years.

This report is full of statistics and discussion on why certain types of websites have been successful, and he gives real examples of the type of sites that will be successful going forward.

He even points out services he will continue paying for, because it would cost him a huge amount of time and money to switch over to another solution.

So the content is very good, and if you read it, and take action, it will make you money.

Towards the end of the report, he goes into 2 very personal, and in some ways embarrasing situations Mike found himself in regarding copyright infringement.

I was already aware of one of these situations, in regards to legal documentation, and I extrapolated that out a little when I recently highlighted potential copyright problems if you share RSS content.

But he has actually been caught out twice. The second time all he did was display a graphic on a website sometime in the past, and the usage was discovered by the company who owned rights in the images.

If you are at all serious about what you are doing on the internet, I highly recommend reading his report. Not only for the insight into what might be successful for marketing in the future, but also to read about his very real copyright problems, and how much it cost him to resolve them.

Read The Death of Internet Marketing

It is quite possible you have seen other people promoting this free report, and you felt it was just another “me too” report, similar to the “Death of Adsense” report that caused such a stir just a few weeks ago.

Mike is using a similar technique to get the word out. The content within the report is insanely valuable, and I agree with a great deal of what Mike has written.

Mike actually skirts around some of the things I am working on with my own large project, but is certainly unaware of what I am looking to create.

It is not often someone gives away what could be a number 1 best selling ebook for free.

Disclosure: I will receive a small payment ($1) if you sign up to download Mike’s free report, and most likely he will send you the occasional email regarding his other products in the future. Mike Filsaime is one of the few Internet Marketers whos mailing lists I sign up to with my primary email account. It is always interesting to watch what he is promoting, but also how he is promoting it.
The tags I have used for this post give some indication of some of the contents, and also hint at some of the unwritten topics it can also affect.