Case Study: RSS Scraping
About 5 months ago I was approached by representatives from TheMoneyBlogs – a service offering to market your blog to their apparently huge reader base. They said they were looking for entrepreneurship blogs and so I told them that I would be interested in their service and asked for an email back detailing what exactly they did.
A few days after, I received an email saying that an account had been created for me and the link to my site (which was then hosted on a .blogspot.com account) had been added to my profile page. I took no further action as I thought a profile had simply been created.
A month or so after this time I remember doing a routine Google Search for the phrase “Blogtrepreneur”. I found that TheMoneyBlogs was (and still is) ranking very highly for the phrase (whilst I was at the top of rankings course!). I clicked on the site to find out and to my horror found my RSS feed being published on the site.
I was immediately outraged and emailed through their contact page asking to find out what had happened and why my RSS Feed was being scraped off my main site and being optimized on this site. What made me angry even more was when I found out that they were even ranking above me for some certain phrases from my site!
To this day, even though 3-5 emails have been sent, I have yet to receive a reply.
First off, I myself would like to be the person to blame for this but I just don’t see how this is my fault. The representatives created my account for me and I had no chance to read the Terms and Conditions which might have stated the use of my RSS Feed.
Secondly, I can’t even remember receiving a username or password and thus cannot access my account and delete my listings from the site. Also the customer service is absolutely dire. Any respectable website would make it a policy to return customer emails as a priority as customers are the life of any business. Even a short wait would have been acceptable but simply no response is just not good enough.
Thirdly, the link that they do have in the sidebar to Blogtrepreneur is outdated and is to my .blogspot.com address and thus is of no use to me or to my site.
So, I am left with a dilemna. Do I allow this site to continue to rip off my RSS feed without permission or do I try and tackle this problem through persistence and continuing emailing? The latter of course will be the only option as Im not prepared to let all my hard work give someone else the benefits of traffic and income. As a plea for help, if anyone can lead me in any directions to remove my site from TheMoneyBlogs then any help would be much appreciated.
Down with the scrapers!
UPDATE: Cesar at FleetheCube has a similar problem – so any help for both of us would be much appreciated!
