Apparently Bloglovin' has jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire again, this time with a Twitter storm and bloggers protesting an (accidental) URL issue that was allowing Bloglovin' to claim too much credit for blogger posts and redirects.
I don't have anything more to add than what's already been stated, and truthfully I don't have all the knowledge about this sort of stuff compared to certain writers like Ashlee from NoseGraze, so I'm going to defer to their articles and link them here to spread the word.
While I am making my decisions and doing research, I shortened my feed from full to short in my website settings.
What's alarming is now Bloglovin' may not only be interfering with page views and SEO of bloggers, but they have created an e-mail subscription service you can sign up for - which through research has been shown to give them too much credit (not you) and spam - please see this article for the examples of how 5 blog posts turned into 16 in someone's e-mail inbox, and not only that, but it said this content was sent from Bloglovin' in the first place, not the blog name. I urge you to use your own subscribe to e-mail service on your website, not through Bloglovin.
Mary from Bookhounds gives advice on how to truncate your feed through RSS and other service providers to help protect content from Bloglovin' and other sources in her (2015) article, BlogLovin Why this service is a disservice to bloggers and how to fix it.
At this time, if you delete or remove your Bloglovin account, your blog and blog posts will still be published to their site. In addition to this, because of controversial copyright laws regarding RSS feeds, they can publish any blog on their site without the owner ever creating an account or approving this. Offbeat YA shows how it happened to her.
It's not just bloggers in an uproar, though - Tumblr banned the site from using their pages a few years ago:
The VentureBeat item quotes a Tumblr spokesperson explaining that Bloglovin’ access to Tumblr’s more than 198 million blogs was suspended because the service was,
The VentureBeat item quotes a Tumblr spokesperson explaining that Bloglovin’ access to Tumblr’s more than 198 million blogs was suspended because the service was,
“unwilling to remove features designed to siphon traffic from Tumblr blogs, including the wholesale reproduction of blog pages.”
The newest update is now Bloglovin as of March 28th:
They are showing full feed posts but with the URL coding they claimed was an error, was reporting to Google search engines that they are the original publishers/owners of the content. What does this mean? It means that search engines would pull up Bloglovin site first when results pop up in search engines, not your actual site. It also means you could be penalized for posting "duplicate content" when systems monitor websites for violation copyright or other resource rules, like through BlogSpot. Sure, you could clear it up with Customer Service, but how to undo being penalized by search engines, or even having Google do something to your blog because of suspicious activity flags?
Bloglovin' is claiming that was a mistake and that it has now been fixed as of March 27th...that discrepancy in the feed bugged me, but what really bothers me?
They have now added their own comment systems on their "feed website" below your content. If I want people to comment on my review or article that I put on my website, I want them to come to my website and post here. I don't want people using Bloglovin's system to comment, where the records are kept about comments on MY content on their servers, sites, under their control, and with their name behind it. I also would miss those comments unless I regularly checked in. This is changing the service from a feed reader/follower to a blogging platform! It is overstepping bounds of controlling content rather than merely sharing it.
Also, if someone DOES share content of a website while reading it through Bloglovin, Bloglovin has inserted THEIR feed link (not your original article URL) and included THEIR name in all the sharing information. As an example, the tweet someone shares would say Bloglovin in it, and send readers back to bloglovin to read your feed, not your site. Not acceptable.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but I have a lot of thinking and research to do when I find the time this week. For right now I'll probably just leave the feed shortened.
Read Ashlee's more informative article on NoseGraze here.
