Autodiscovery and RSS Scraping

Published: September 5, 2007, 2:49 pm

Tags: prevention, articles, autodiscovery, content theft, copyright infringement, plagiarism, rss, scraping, spam, spam blogs, splogs

Feed autodiscovery is one of the most powerful tools available for encouraging feed usage and subscription. Theoretically at least, by giving browsers and feed readers an easy way to identify the feed and users an intuitive way to subscribe to it, more people will take advantage of it. However, when a reader of this site had a template issue and was forced to do away with feed autodiscovery on his site, he wondered if it might help him put a stop to the spammers who have been scraping his feed. Though the idea was tempting, the sad truth is that autodiscovery does not play a major role one way or another in dealing with feed scraping. Though it helps browsers and users find the feed, spammers have other methods of feed detection that bypass not only the tags in your HTML, but your site altogether. Discovering Autodiscovery Feed autodiscovery is little more than a series of hidden tags that enable a browser to locate the feed automatically. They are usually embedded in the head of the

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