I thought I’d update you on my interaction with Skweezer who in my last post I expressed my frustration with for duplicating the content on my blogs.
Last night I sent an email to them asking to remove all of my domains and sub-domains from their site. I explained some of my reasons for doing so.
This morning I had two replies – firstly from their customer service department asking me to confirm my desire to be removed – they will be doing so shortly (as I note they have done with Weblogs Inc’s blogs already). The second email was from Barnabas Kendall from Greenlight Wireless who I want to acknowledge has been helpful in getting my sites removed from his program and who invited my feedback to Skweezer – but whom I also feel seems a little naive or deluded as to the impact his site is having on the publishers who are providing content to him without their knowledge.
I am continuing to correspond with Barnabas and am assured by him that he will be making a full statement shortly to explain further his side of the story.
My main concerns remain that:
1. That content that they duplicate like this downgrades the page ranking of my site. Google will not differentiate between my original content and their duplicated content. It will actually devalue both of our sites.
2. That I seem to be doing all the work in the equation. I research and writes (which takes hours), I host the images and they simply copy it onto their site and charge their readers for the privilege of reading it – and add their own ads to it. This is in direct violation of my (and most other bloggers) creative commons license which says that my content cannot be used for commercial purposes.
Anyway – I’ll be off their system shortly and will continue to discuss this with Barnabas.
By the way – if you wish to be removed from Skweezer it is best to email customer.care@skweezer.net and put something in the subject line like ‘Please Remove my Site’.
Update: Barnabas has added a response to Green Light Wireless’s new Blog.
