Rhody Trader

One of my little pet peeves in reading other people’s blogs – and I have a long list that I at least scan - is how some folks do little more than just grab stuff from other websites and blogs and such and make those quotes the bulk of their blog posts. What’s the point? If you want to share stuff like that, link to them and provide some value of your own.

Now I’m not saying there isn’t value to be had in quoting things from other places. I’m not trashing bloggers who do that from time to time in a limited fashion. It’s the folks whose primary focus is on posting other people’s work that bug me.

Do these people realize they are actual hurting both themselves and those they are “borrowing” from? Search engines tend to penalize websites for duplicate content.

This actually kind of ties in with a discussion that’s been going on with Barry Ritholtz being one of the leading names in the exchange. Bloggers, especially the higher profile ones, are questioning the value of republishing and repackaging sites. In Barry’s case he was referring to Seeking Alpha, but there are other examples, and was questioning the value of continuing to follow that path and the impact it was having on his “brand”.

For my own part, I see almost all of my trading education blog content getting grabbed by Reuters through BlogBurst. Those postings do not inherently link back to my blog. If I didn’t included related posts and/or other links within the post, I’d get no linkbacks at all, on top of my content being duplicated elsewhere – potentially devaluing it to search engines. I am getting some traffic, though, which is the only thing that keeps me doing this.

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