Desperate For Content

Some people are in need of content for their web sites. Since they don't enjoy creating the content themselves, they use the content of others.

If you don't want to write articles from scratch, there are free-to-reprint articles on the web. The original writers gain because if you use their article on your web site, you'll need to put a link back to the original writer's web site.

After a while, however, content-starved sites can only get so much mileage from reprint articles. Some have now started publishing rss feeds.

More and more sites offer rss feeds (those things that end in .xml or .rdf, for example). This helps readers easily see what's new in many web sites without having to actually visit those sites. All they do is visit a one-page news or rss feeds aggregator, and they can see the titles of articles recently added to 20, 50 or more blogs or web sites.

Some sites republish these rss feeds to give search engines the impression that their web site has constantly changing content. This makes some search engine robots visit their site regularly, which may (or may not) lead to improved rankings in the search engines.

I wonder how long this practice will work, because some people are starting to complain. See Ed Brill's Stop, Blog Thief!

I'm tempted to stop offering an rss feed for this site. Afterall, very few people read it anyway. :-) Why waste the bandwidth just for "instant" blog sites, right? Anyway, let's go find a solution to this...
[ First posted on 05/30/2005 by Manuel Viloria ]