SocialRank A Site Scraper Or MFA Play, Or Both?

Author: Jim Kukral Category: MFA, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

Wednesday
Oct 3, 2007

You decide. SocialRank.com is creating useful, high-quality websites that help people… or they are producing fancy made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites that scrap blog content?

Bloggingtips pointed this out to me. There are some good comments from the Socialrank representative in that blog entry. I’ll let you decide for yourself the answer to my question above.

One of the sites they have created is a site called Mightyblogger.com. Well, apparently I am listed in the scrape for that site right on their very own blog.

Every day, MightyBlogger.com will list the top 15 stories of the day from blogging experts who teach other bloggers how to boost their blog income. We cover stories from the usual stars like JohnChow and Sabahan. But we also point you to some up and coming new Blogging experts you may never have heard of.

Each day, we also recommend 15 blogging experts who experienced a sudden boost in attention to their postings.

The list right now includes:

1. eXtra For Every Publisher
2. John Chow
3. Entrepreneurs Journey
4. Blog Clout
5. Mama Blogga
6. Blog Tips about Blogging
7. Blogging Tips
8. The Gospel According To Rhys
9. Jim Kukral - Marketing Ideas Online
10. Weblog Tools Collection
11. My Debt Free Goal
12. Enkay - Blog
13. Zac Johnson- Blog
14. Kyle Cove
15. Daily Moolah dot Com

Hope these help in your quest to moving up the ranks as a professional blogger.

I have a question though. When did I opt-in to have my content scraped so you could make a buck from it?

I didn’t. It’s hard to believe that Google would allow this site to continue to be ranked in the future.

The only way I would be ok with this is if they emailed me first and asked me if I wanted to be scraped. It’s called opt-in. That isn’t happening.

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Comments

Vishen

October 4th, 2007 at 12:32 am

hi Jim. I’m the co-founder of SocialRank. I also a marketing blogger. My 9Rules blog is blog.mindvalleylabs.com

We’re not scraping your content. Please take a closer look at the site. We show your post headline and first 3 lines. But everything links to you. Right down to comments.

What we’re displaying here is akin to TechMeme or Google Search Results. We’re ranking Blog Monetization posts in order of importance for this day. The rankings change daily.

Take a closer look at the site as well as MarketingLens.com and you’ll see that these are simply TechMeme style services for marketers.

Yes we carry adsense. Heck so does BlinkList (our previous invention) and our blog. What we offer unique on SocialRank sites is the rankings. It’s a snapshot of the most critical posts.

I’ll be available to answer any tough questions.

Jim Kukral

October 4th, 2007 at 9:04 am

It’s not really what I think Vishen. It’s what Google thinks. They have to determine if your model provides value or not, and if they don’t, they’ll most likely shut down your Adsense accounts. But who knows what they’ll do, if they do anything.

I’ve been blogging since 2001, and I’m over being offended by this type of thing. I write about it because I’m on a constant quest to understand this space I work in and I value others opinions.

Maybe I’m wrong and you are providing value. That’s for bigger fish to decide.

Vishen

October 5th, 2007 at 1:26 am

Jim, thanks for the comment. The value that we’re providing is our ranking of posts in the long tail of the blogosphere. Think TechMeme - but for areas like Knitting, Atheism, Indie Films, Parenting, DIY.

And yes, Google and the general blogosphere do understand the value in this. The apparent value will grow when we release some features to actually help bloggers in these niches understand what posts they write actually strike the right notes with readers. This helps bloggers become better and nailing the right content.

Remember - I am a blogger. I own 9 blogs. And our team built BlinkList.com, which is used by some 200,000 people and linked to on some 75,000 blogs. We’re not new in this field.

Amar Goel

October 9th, 2007 at 9:07 am

Jim, You mention above that when did I give the okay for someone to scrape my content and make a buck from it. Isn’t that what Google does? They scrape your content and sell links against it?

Jim Kukral

October 9th, 2007 at 9:11 am

@amar,

You have to get over it. Google can do whatever they way. Like it, or don’t like it, but yes, the rules do not apply to them. You can call it the same, and at a high level view, it might be, but in the end, they get away with it…

because they can. End of argument.

I would think more people would stop worrying about Google’s rules so much, and instead just play along and work with them? Your business would be much more successful.