This morning I noticed inbound traffic on my WordPress dashboard coming from RecipeReports-dot-com (I'm intentionally not linking to them here to avoid raising their GoogleRank). Turns out, it's a massive splog.
In a post I put up just last night, I also see plenty of "borrowed" content from other food blogs, including Simply Recipes and Serious Eats. You may want to head over there and see if any of it is yours.
This Post was written by Anita from Married ...with Dinner
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ps: I filed a complaint with Google AdSense, reasoning that if we take away their revenue stream, we can shut them down. To do do yourself, click on "Ads by Google" in the middle grey column. From the landing page, click "Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw". In the questionnaire, click "Also Report a Violation" and fill in the relevant info.
I've filed probably 50 Google reports.
err? Please correct me if I'm wrong, however it looked to me if they (recipe reports) in this case were actually linking off to the correct blogs? and only posting a rss summary of said posts?
This is fairly common and zillions of well established sites (technorati, del.icio.us, wikio..) do this.
They are in effect advertising your blog, surely this is a good thing?
I'm actually in Bron's camp with this one -- I also noticed some (little) inbound traffic from that site. But the excerpts are wee, they give away no real meat, and they do generate traffic and authority. So, I'm not so worked up about it.
I'll respectfully disagree with Bron and Sean and point out two red flags that illustrate the difference between Recipe Reports and a legitimate site:
- They list no contact information for removing your content (or to reach them for any other purpose)
- They're clearly profiting from AdSense placements, which is clearly their primary reason for existence
There's a serious difference between a courtesy link from a real blog, or a valid syndication, and this kind of blatant Splog scraping.
This guy is not doing us any favors; he's scraping your copyrighted content to bring eyeballs to his site, in order to make a buck.
But hey, if it works for you, more power to ya.
~A
I know it is tacky to point out, but if you are doing a recipe site (recipe reports) it would be good to know how to spell dessert (not desert).
But ExpatChef, where else are you going to get your desert recipies [sic]?
Anita, I totally understand where you're coming from, and although I still am not especially vexed by this site, I certainly do not feel that what they are doing is ethical or in any way valuable.
I do think, though, that a site similar to this, done better, could be a valuable resource, sort of a portal into recipe-oriented content on the web. This isn't that.
Ooh, Sean... you mean sort of like BLogSoop but for recipes? I like!
Sean and Anita, stay tuned. I happen to know someone who's working on a site just like you're describing. I think food bloggers are really going to like it.
At first I looked and it and thought, okay, a site that aggregates little digests of all the current recipes being blogged and TAGGED them consistently ... that might be useful!
However, they're not really chosing the sites, it's all (as far as I can tell) by keywords. An aggregator usually choses sites to include - and sometimes only categories from those sites. This is letting some spiderbot chose based on parameters.
I'd say that you have the right to ask to have your content removed.
While I'm here I should mention that www.Rojo.com is republishing quite a few sites ... I saw Sam's & Clothilde's up there.
Hi all,
Although you might find the republishing of some of your feed on this site annoying, I would caution against filing a DMCA complaint with Google in this case.
Copyright laws allow for the "fair use" of content, which includes excerpts. I think this aggregation of content would easily fall within the "excerpt" range. They aren't pulling photos (which are copyright protected), they aren't pulling full feeds or even the full amount of what I publish as a partial feed.
If you file a DMCA complaint and the use of the content is found to be "fair use" and legal, then you are liable for a fine, which last I checked was at least $1000. Read the Google rules carefully (look up DMCA Google on google.com)
This particular aggregation of feeds doesn't bother me at all as far as my content is concerned. They provide a link back to my site. They're not taking the photo. I get the value of the link towards my Google page rank. They are not pulling the full article.
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