There’s a bit of a debate that goes on in different corners of the blog world about the somewhat common practice of republishing blog posts via RSS feed. The republisher, generally someone trying to create content without any work for the purpose search engine traffic and AdSense revenue, simply creates sites and posts various RSS feeds for the content.

Some people view it as being ripped off, while others view it as additional exposure.

The ripped off camp suggests ways to combat this using various tools and services.

My feed gets republished frequently, but I happen to fall into the additional exposure is good camp. First off, the folks republishing the feed are likely getting no benefit to speak of as Google and Google AdSense folks frown on this activity, can spot it easily, and don’t usually reward it. Some people suggest the dreaded “Google duplicate content penalty” might come into play here, but I’ve not seen any impact of this on anyone but the republishers.

Now, there is one tactic that I do employ to assure that I get the proper exposure because I did notice the occasional republisher forget to even mention where the content came from or link back to the original. I’m sure it’s just an oversight so to help them I use a WordPress plugin called RSS-Footer.

RSS-Footer automatically adds a line of content to every post in the RSS feed. Since 99% of the folks participating in this kind of republishing simply publish the feed, this line starts every post – This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Here’s an example of someone republishing my feed. Because I also use the Related Posts plugin that points to other posts on my site related to this one, this page has 6 links back to my blog – I can live with that.

Image credit: cybaea

style=”margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;”>