**UPDATE** – The guys have come up with some ideas for us to fight the problem described below, so I’m going to try switching back to the full feed for now and see how it goes. But I need your help… if you come across more sites leaching our feeds, please let me know about it. Thanks!
Hey guys, just a little technical in-house chat for those of you who subscribe to our RSS feed.
You may have noticed that we just recently changed the RSS feeds to only send out the titles of the posts. This is not something I’m happy about at all… but as I’ll explain, it’s something I just have no choice in.
For some time we had the RSS feeds carry the whole posts… so that if you subscribed to The Movie Blog through an RSS reader, you would get the entire body of the articles going up on The Movie Blog. Sounds great right? Well… we started to notice a problem…. other websites using our rss feed… coding it into their sites… an passing off all our posts as their own automatically. None of these sites responded to the emails I sent them asking them to stop… so I changed the RSS feeds to being just the titles with a large excerpt from the post.
But now we’re recognized that the problem is MUCH worse than I first thought. And it’s damaging The Movie Blog something fierce. You see… it’s not just a couple of sites leaching our feeds…. it’s literally DOZENS and DOZENS of sites… close to 100. Ok, now you may think that sucks… but… who cares right? As long as people still read TMB… well here’s the problem:
GOOGLE. Google does not like what it calls “duplicate content”. In other words, the exact same content on different pages. When their system recognizes pages that are duplicate content, the system can relegate those pages to Google’s “supplemental index”. That’s basically a set of pages that will only really come up in Google search results if nothing else relevant appears.
Sooooo… all these sites stealing our feeds are hammering our pages into the Supplemental Index on Google, and killing a huge huge huge chunk of our Google traffic. I noticed our Google traffic was shrinking a few months ago, but I could never figure out why it was happening. Today I finally talked to two sets of google consultants… and they both pointed to this as the culprit.
I know some of you are mad at me for changing the feeds to just the titles of the posts… but I’m sorry guys… I simply have no choice. Once I figure out how to have feeds that site leaches can’t steal and republish, I’ll go back to full feeds, I promise. But without exaggeration, long term this problem is one that could literally shut down The Movie Blog (yes yes I know… some people think that would be a good thing).
THE MOVIE BLOG COMMUNITY
Some of you have noticed that the Movie Blog Community site is down. We’ve had a massive technical problem… and it is being worked on as we speak (damn WordPress). I’ll keep you updated on its progress. Keep checking.
