What's your opinion on this Adsense Web site idea? White-hat? Gray-hat? or Black-hat? I have mixed opinions but there seem to be a number of these types of sites out there. 1) Build an RSS feed aggregator for different blogs within a given niche. 2) Display the aggregated feed on a Web site using only the first 300 or so characters from each post with links to the originating blog's article and the originating blog's home page. 3) Allow blog owners to include or exclude their blogs from the aggregated feed at will. To me this sounds like a scraper site, but does it become more acceptable when only short excerpts are used and all links point back to the originating blog? Does this fall under the doctrine of "fair use" if there's a legitimate attempt to aggregate the niche blogs and drive traffic to the originating site?
I think this is okay, because you a providing a service that collates together blogs for a given niche. Users can then come to your site to catch up on their chosen niche. Similar to what I've done myself... The important thing is that you have content, even though it is neither complete nor original. You are not claiming the content to be your own, which is also good. Cryo.
I would suggest asking the owners of the content you are republishing before using their hard work to slap together a site.
On this note, isn't "fair use" permission implied given that the blog owner is providing a publicly available RSS feed?
Not necessarily, unless you are given credit directly. By directly I mean, do you have a link 'directly' to their site for the content you're using? Having the title of the article link is just as sufficient, but it must be a direct link to their site, otherwise....it's just stealing IMHO. RSS feeds are created to help a sites visitors read up in their favorite aggregator, not have other webmaster earn revenue off of their writing.
There would definitely be links directly to the originating article and originating blog home page as mentioned in the first post. This would be a true aggregator designed to compile niche blogs and drive traffic to participating blogs. Does the fact that the aggregator is Adsense-supported change the site's legitimacy?
I wouldn't think so, as long as its a direct link, like you mentioned. I recently had a run in with a webmaster that was, in my opinion, stealing my content. He had created a site that was 90% composed of my RSS feed, but instead of linking directly to me he was linking to my feedburner page. IMHO, this does not give me any kind of real credit to my site. Along that content was riddled with Adsense ads, just seems to be a moral thing to me. However, what your stating would be a live link and to me, would be fine. If nothing else, it would help those blogs with traffic and publicity.
there are load od website doing the same thing down i have found people visiting my site from a few of these sites.
I'd second the suggestion that you should ask permission first from blog owners. RSS is a service to readers... not permission for someone else to use the content, even if it's just an abstract.
Well I think this is a very grey area. A few months back there was quite a uproar about Google News which uses RSS feeds from different sites. Website owners were complaining that Google was "stealing" their content and profiting from it. Google doesn't show any ads on their News pages or include ads on your customized homepage for this reason. If you are going to have Adsense on the pages where you display the information from the RSS feeds, you might have similar problems.
Thanks for that tidbit, Crusader. I'll do some research into Google's problems related to their news search and see if I can get any further clarification.
It seems pretty white-hat, mostly it seems like you are just providing the publishers a nice service.
@ Original Poster - I don't think so there is anything wrong in it and it's totally white hat. The other guy himself is providing RSS feed to others. Anyway you will also get duplicate penalty so the other guy's content will still be at top. kind of funny since google is providing them free traffic for nothing. Google just show two lines and then put the link of news page People are willing to submit to ezine who is making tons of money by showing there ads from others content but they have problem with google news
It was mostly a case of google using copyrighted image I believe, at least in the case of AFP. Although I only skim read the case.
True. I wouldn't mind having my sites articles listed in Google news. However some webmasters/websites are funny that way. Don't want anyone using their headlines or content in any way... even if it would mean loads of incoming traffic for them.
I think this could be a problem: 300 characters could well be the majority of the content of a post, seeing as most of them are pretty short anyhow. But the other thing is, although a lot of RSS feeds provide the full post, mostly it is because the site owners expect the feed just to appear on someone's feed reader, not on another site. Some feeds are not produced by the site owner, but are instead are scraped from the site. So you can't assume that just because there is an RSS feed, that automatically means that permission is granted. This is the whole reason I only provide teasers in my RSS feeds, rather than full articles.
I just thought I'd update everyone. I launched my blog feed aggregator site last Monday, and the initial feedback from the bloggers linked on the site has been nothing but positive. It's off to a great start (at least in terms of public relations)...no negative feedback to speak of whatsoever, and I'm getting backlinks galore from the blogs associated with the site. Page views are increasing quickly, but there probably won't be much in the way of revenue until the site matures a bit and gets indexed. Thanks again for all of your earlier advice! You DP-ers sure know your stuff.
A lot of bloggers and websites have "Syndicate" button. Clearly, they are happy if you pick up their content.