Xenite.Org Fighting Parasitical Websites

Being popular has its drawbacks, especially on the Internet. If other people see that you are successful they may try to siphon off some of that success. Our sister site Xenite.Org has recently found its content being used by several other sites hoping to exploit the vast interest in Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”, which opened in theaters around the world in December.

Instead of writing their own articles about The Hobbit and Peter Jackson’s movies these Websites have been republishing articles from Xenite.Org, TheOneRing.Net, and other sources of fannish content. So far as we can determine these unscrupulous publishers have not contacted the original sites to ask permission to reuse content.

Under the general interpretation of “fair use doctrine” it’s generally okay to use up to about 20-25% of a copyrighted work provided you include additional commentary and proper attribution. On the Web, it is common for some sites to republish the RSS feeds of other Websites, linking back to the original articles. It is this republication of RSS feeds that leads Xenite.Org, SF-Fandom, and other sites to only publish “partial feeds” — these are shortened versions of the articles we publish on our blogs.

While it is inconvenient for people who use RSS readers to subscribe to partial feeds it is a necessary defense against so-called “scraping”. However, one “Web marketer” who has registered about 1100 domains (we don’t know how many are active) has developed or purchased software that fetches the partial RSS feed, extracts the link to the article from it, and then grabs the entire article for republication on his own sites.

These people are clearly using everyone else’s content for their own benefit out of pure laziness and greed. They may be promoting products and services through on-site widgets or they may simply be earning “passive income” from Google advertising or other networks. These made-for-advertising Websites have been the cause of much grief and dispute in online marketing for years.

Although Google attempts to figure out where the original source of an article is, it doesn’t always make the best choice. For example, if you search for any of the following articles you may not find Xenite.Org listed first in Google’s search results:

• Why Did Peter Jackson Change Azog from the Book?
• Why Is Azog Called the White Orc?
• How Faithful Is Peter Jackson’s Hobbit to Tolkien’s Book?
• Why Does Peter jackson Ignore So Much of Tolkien’s Middle-earth History?

The list goes on. Sometimes the sites listed above Xenite.Org are legitimate “aggregator” sites that just earn a lot of links. These sites usually only republish a headline with a link back to the original article. We don’t mind getting traffic from them. But once in a while you find a Website (like TheLandofShadow.com) that is clearly using parasitical SEO to deceive people into thinking it is publishing original content.

These kinds of Websites are cheating fans by misleading them into reading only partial articles — and by not giving proper attribution to the people who write the original content. They are using search engines’ practices against them to artificially promote low-quality scraper content above the original content.

Our friends at Communizine (another site in the Xenite.Org network) have published an article explaining how parasitical SEO practices hurt SciFi fansites and how you as a fansite operator can strike back at these scrapers.

We encourage you to reward good Website behavior by linking to the original articles, even if you read them on secondary Websites; we also encourage you to punish bad Website behavior by NOT linking to Websites that are using other sites’ content without proper attribution. We science fiction fans should not be blindly supporting unscrupulous Internet marketers who are just trying to make money without putting out any legitimate effort.