Truncating? Truncating (or compressing) is a word that you've probably seen A LOT this week if you follow a few different blogs or maybe you've seen a tutorial pinned on Pinterest. Truncating is something that starting now will be the way I have to post for my blog.
Why? Well...Unfortunately there are these people called "scrapers" who’s job is to steal and literally scrape the content word for word right off of mine and other bloggers sites. I work hard to make my blog what it is, averaging 2-3 hours per post. It’s become a business for me recently too, and I have been working extremely hard to make it what it is.
So try to imagine you're me for a bit... Your chit chatting with a few blogging friends about how their content was recently stolen on so and so's site. You don't really think too much about it because you're still a fairly new blogger, and your friends are MUCH bigger bloggers. Then one night you decide to type in your blogs name into the search box on the internet and see what pops up. You do it. You're horrified! Just within the the first two pages of the search results your personal blog posts, the posts that you worked on for hours, are on some site that has nothing to do with you, and to make matters worse they have flooded your posts with links to ads that they (the scrapers) are getting paid for. It's violating.
So what exactly is truncating and how is it going to protect my content? From now on my blog posts are going to appear shortened. They will have a little link button that might say something like "click here to read more" which you will have to click to get the full story. It stinks...I know! But unfortunately I have to do it to protect the integrity of my blog.
The easiest way for a scraper to steal my content is to simply "copy and paste" so by truncating it will give them one more step to do which hopefully will deter their lazy butts!
Please know that each and every one of you are important to me, and I really don't want to do this, but am in a lot of ways being forced to as are many other bloggers....so I'm hoping you'll stick with me as I go through this change!
If you are a blogger yourself and would like more information on how to truncate your own posts shoot me an email and I'll be happy to assist you.
Wow, this week the truncating wave is seriously hitting! EVERYONE is doing it! So, I've got a question, how do you find out if your stuff has been stolen?
ReplyDeleteIt's a good idea to do this, I know a lot of people hate it but I think not only does it help protect our content as bloggers it also helps make our main pages look neater.
ReplyDeleteHI Christine, I have read a bit about it this week, and was actually considering doing this myself. I really don't mind it actually, and like you, I hope others don't mind it as well. Sorry to hear you have had this problem.
ReplyDeleteThe "truncated"/summary/preview is easier to navigate on blogs anyways. It's easier to scroll a page of 5-10 posts instead of a very long page. You may also want to add a second page linking to the rest of your content to force readers to keep reading and weed out the bots. Just my suggestions, take it or leave it :)
ReplyDelete