Ethical Use of RSS

Posted on May 17, 2005

“I have a question on the legality of using such tools with rss.

Is it legal to use rss on your site. I read somewhere that it might not be. I am tring to find a definate answer to this question, before investing my money.

Thanks, Daniel”

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Hi Daniel!

Thanks for writing!

The whole idea behind RSS is ’syndication’ - it expands a writer or marketer’s reach to areas where we wouldn’t be found otherwise.

Personally I love it when someone grabs my RSS feed and displays it on their site. I get off-site page rank, visitors clicking through that I might never have ‘met’, etc.

For me, it’s a win-win situation.

However not all marketers or writers feel that way. For instance, my friend Jason (a long time blogger) does not like other sites scooping his feed and stealing his bandwidth.

And, although I’m not 100% certain today (but will look into it), I think google frowns upon use of their news feed as well.

Setting up an automated rss poster requires a few hours of pre-digging - get the best feed to match your content (you’ll want a keyword rich feed for your target market) plus searching on the host site to see if they have any notices (i.e., Use of this feed is prohibited.) Yahoo has a new feature now in beta called Creative Commons - you can search for content that is specifically ‘tagged’ as free to use.

Of course it goes without saying…if a webmaster contacts you and asks you to stop using their feed, comply immediately.

BlogPower and RSS2Blog

I haven’t fully tested blogpower yet (I’ve been struck with a nasty cold), but I can tell you that RSS2Blog was an easy set up and I can change the content it uses on a moment’s notice. I am still testing and tracking the power of automated posting but I will share a tip or two here.

determine your targeted keywords first.
don’t have the software posting every minute of every hour - you want your blog to appear ‘natural’ to the search engines.
it’s my preference not to use an automated poster on my own personal blog, but on an off-site feeder blog. (i.e. a blog linking into my sites) - page rank ‘leaks’ to my site, and I get off-site ‘points’ for links coming in.

I’ll have documented test results in a few weeks on RSS2Blog as well as some insight into BlogPower’s use. However feel free to drop me a line anytime in the meantime if you have more questions or require clarification.

Truly, Laura Childs

If you’d like to know more about blog marketing view the Making Money With Blogs category or visit technorati’s blog marketing page.