TylerM – Tyler Menezes

Thought splogs were run by the same underground groups who send out 90% of your email spam? Meet fav.or.it, a company who seems to have adapted it as their business model.

The tagline used by the company is “bringing blogging to the masses” (implying that they are a feed-reader/mashup site). Most bloggers, however, should be able to see in short time the true purpose of the site - making money on the content of others. Yep, it even uses the same trick used by all other splogs, feed scraping.

Well, why don’t you consider this a feed reader? The site does not function much like a traditional feed reader. Everything posted copied there is public - it’s not in any major way custom to a user. Everyone will see the same posts - even spiders - as if fav.or.it is the originator of the content.

Which leads me to one of my main problems with fav.or.it, it looks to spiders, as though they created the content. The full-text of the article is hosted there, and contains one link-back that, at the moment, is rel=no-follow’ed. Meaning that, to spiders, it seems that fav.or.it is the one which created the content. Seeing as fav.or.it has a higher PR than most small blogs, this may even lead some search engines to blacklist the actual blogger when they see the duplicate content.

My second problem with fav.or.it is one of attribution. They provide one link - one very small link - at the top of the post. When I say small, I mean one 10px by 10px icon. This icon is strategically placed right next to another link. This is, in my opinion, done to trick users into thinking the two links lead to the same place, at which most users would not be careful to where they’re clicking.

One really obvious problem that is probably evident by the previous two points is that fav.or.it does not hold the copyright to any works they repost on their site, nor do they check to see if submitted feeds are licensed under any license which would allow them to repost it.

Personally, this makes me upset. I’ve contacted their abuse team, and asked them to blacklist my feed. I’ll update this post if anything happens. In the meantime, I’d like to make one thing clear: reposting my content on a site with ads for your profit is not covered under this license.