Dear Vancouvergo.com

I found an incoming link on my WordPress dashboard this evening from Vancouvergo.com. Now I’ve seen these types of sites before, sometimes the just look for syndicated blog posts or news articles about a certain topic, in this case “Vancouver”, and conglomerate that information onto one big website or source.

That’s all fine and dandy because most sites like that use the original post and link directly to the original entry on the author’s site.

However, in the case of Vancouvergo.com they have completely copied/pasted the html from my blog post and created their very own hyperlink for the article. The only link back to my site was actually something I linked to in the body of my posts – hence my WordPress notification. Other than that, there is not one hyperlink to my actual story, only plain text at the very end saying: “From
https://www.miss604.com/2007/07/vancouver-summer-events-guide-pt-3.html” (no link).

There is no comments section or contact form on the site so if you or someone you know is an editor of Vancouvergo.com I would simply ask that you do not copy and paste my story and create your own hyperlink for my article, soaking up my google juice and reproducing my original content without permission. I’m happy to be included as a source for Vancouver info and feel free to syndicate my posts on your site as long as you fully link back to the source with credit. At the very least state “By Rebecca Bollwitt” or I’ll even settle for “By Miss604” at the top of the article. [view this site’s Creative Commons license].

I’m growing tired of seeing inbound links to my blog from news aggregators. If I felt these aggregators were around to provide a relatively cohesive website for a particular topic, I might support them. But most of the ones that link to me are simply trying to make a profit on advertising, and that bothers me that other people are using my work to try and make money. To counter that, I have explicitly stated on the bottom of my blog (in the footer) that the works on this website are protected under a CC non-commercial license. I don’t mind other people cutting pieces out of my articles to support intellectual blog entries of their own, even if they have adsense (because I have some here on my buried pages), but I’m going to deliberately clamp down on aggregators, or people who I feel are lifting blog entries of mine. [Duane Storey]

If you are a blogger, photo sharer or user of the web, please take some time to educate yourself about Creative Commons licensing and attribution on the CC site wiki or read Duane’s post regarding photos.