RSS Ethics - Stealing Content Or Adding Value?

Displaying RSS feeds on your website (a.k.a. "syndicating") is an easy way to get an automated stream of fresh content for your site. But is it ethical? There are two questions involved:

1) Are you "injuring" the publisher of the content?

2) Are you "injuring" third parties?

(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. This article should not be considered legal advice).

Since you're reproducing content someone else owns the copyright to, #1 is both a legal and an ethical question. And not everyone agrees on the answer.

Since RSS invented for syndication, some argue that publishing an RSS feed implicitly authorizes others to syndicate it. In most cases, if you syndicate in a way that benefits the publisher, that seems to be a safe assumption.

A few generally accepted rules for syndicating ethically include:

1. not syndicating feeds that expressly forbid it and honoring all requests to stop

2. not syndicating the full content of full-content feeds (just display excerpts from each item)

3. always linking to the original source of the content

4. linking in a way that's counted by the search engines (don't use 'rel="nofollow"' or JavaScript links)

5. caching the RSS feed on your server so you won't use the publisher's bandwidth to reload it whenever someone loads your webpage (this speeds your website up too)

If you follow rules 2, 3 and 4, you "pay" the publisher for their content by:

* sending traffic to their site (you can make the links open in a new browser window if you want)

* giving them a boost in the search engines by giving them in-bound links (this can help you too since the search engines like sites that link to related content)

What about third parties? Consider how syndication affects the search engines: are you wasting their resources by making them index duplicate content? Or are you syndicating in a way that adds value and helps them find the best content for their users?

Here are a few ways to use RSS feed content that add value:

1. Syndicating RSS feed items that were hand-picked for quality and relevance alongside valuable, related, original content.

2. Syndicating RSS feeds that were hand-picked for quality alongside original content. Since only the feed is hand-picked, not each individual item, the value is a little lower than #1.

3. Syndicating search-based content from an aggregator that ranks the quality of the search results alongside original content (for example, using quality-ranked blog search results as opposed to items listed in random or time-based order).

4. Aggregating hand-picked related items from multiple feeds (with no original content).

5. Aggregating multiple hand-picked, related RSS feeds (no original content).

Anything less doesn't add value, wastes resources, and doesn't pass ethical muster. For example:

* Syndicating randomly selected, related RSS content alongside original content (regardless of the quality of the RSS content).

* Syndicating any RSS content alongside poor quality content to get the poor content ranked higher.

* Syndicating unrelated content alongside any content to get the content ranked higher (which might work since auto-updating content increases the freshness of the page).

* Publishing pages built solely of content from a single RSS feed (no matter what the quality -- it's purely duplicate content).

* Publishing pages built solely of content aggregated from multiple feeds without regard to quality (bringing together multiple sources of related content can be useful, but only if it's useful content).

Syndication is a great way to deliver quality content to your site's visitors. Just be sure to do it ethically.

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About The Author:

Antone Roundy is the programmer of a PHP RSS parser script named CaRP Evolution. He has always actively encouraged his users to syndicate ethically.

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