At its best, a good aggregator will collect and compile a selection of relevant links to articles. There is no attempt to repurpose the content from those articles, just to lead people to them.

A good aggregator might also present a collection of links with a summary of the content. However, I feel that the summary should be unique and original to the aggregation site, not content that was pulled from the source.

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Getting into murkier waters, take any of the above examples, and make the links “nofollow.” This isn’t right. If a source is good enough to be included in the aggregator, then it should get credit for its work.

There also are sites like Google News, which present the links with a snippet from the source article itself. Generally, if there is a link to the original source and the link is left intact, then I don’t have a problem with this, provided that the snippet is SHORT. If the link is tagged “nofollow,” I don’t like it, but if the snippet is very short, I probably won’t raise too much of a fuss about it.

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I do not like aggregation sites that pull data from RSS feeds and make the link to the source a 302 redirect. This isn’t cool. There’s a very big foreign aggregator that pulls this nonsense, and the links can replace your sites standings in Google. I don’t care what Google says, they have a problem with 302 redirects.

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Moving further down the chain, there are aggregation sites that pull a paragraph or two from the source. Often, these aggregators use a “nofollow” link. This, to me, is problematic. Google, in particular, is very bad at properly crediting the original source, even with a normal link. Throw a “nofollow” in there — which Newstin does — and you’re asking for trouble. Newstin is one of the biggest offenders of this practice, and they publish the content across a broad spectrum of domains (newstin.com, newstin.co.in, etc.).

It would not bother me so much if sites like Newstin also blocked these pages from being read by search engines. That way my site would not be harmed by the “borrowed” content. This, unfortunately, is not the case, which leads me to believe that these aggregators are just using my content to benefit their own bottom line.

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Finally, there are those aggregators that pull entire articles. There are a *lot* of blogspot blogs that do this. Sometimes there are links to the source. Sometimes there are not. In both cases, it can cause serious harm to a site — particularly in Google.

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I keep mentioning Google because these things seem to harm a site in Google, but not in Yahoo or Bing. Google is so bad at properly crediting the original source, it really draws into question as to what is fair use. Given Google’s size and the amount of traffic it can bring to a site, I would say this: if your site is harmed in Google by the practices of an aggregator, it’s not fair use.

Is this bad?

As an author, I object to sites using significant content from my blog on theirs. Fair use is the key. I can’t see quoting 50% or more of a post’s content as fair use. Aggregators who duplicate content on their sites are, in my opinion, violating copyright law. A lede paragraph or two with a link back to the source is perfectly fine in my eyes — as long as the blog post byline doesn’t lead readers to think the aggregating site has written the content.

It’ll be interesting to see what othe responses you get.