Botmill.com – NOT COOL

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Okay, you had a robo-blog.  That’s fine.  Nothing wrong with that.  In fact, I’m appreciative for some of those posts and blogs you pointed out to me.  You apologized profusely, though I don’t there’s a need to apologize for a robo-blog per se.

However, since then your robo-blogs have gotten worse.  The one associated with 3D-Printer-Parts.com, which links back to your site, is collecting anything and everything with the words “made, make, printer, 3d, 3-d” et cetera.  Oh, but that’s not the worst part.

Botmill is stealing the entire content of other people’s works and not providing any attribution.  That link is to one of my own posts (and not a particularly interesting one) copied whole cloth and posted in your own blog.

Make up your mind – do you want to be a blog aggregator or sell robot parts? There are tons of aggregators out there.  Not many are very good.  The ones that are have a real person picking and choosing.  The robo-blogs are basically packed with irrelevant or useless content.  Turn off the robo-blog and drop the fake secondary sites.  Rather than stealing the content of potential customers, why not write some of your own content.  How about posting some information about your own products?  Or some innovations of your own?  Stolen content doesn’t help you with customers, hurts your Google PageRank, and actually causes ill will.

Why not take a page from MakerBot and MakerGear?  Have a contest, give some stuff away, write some interesting things, ask them for help, show them you care, involve your customers, and form a community.

12 thoughts on “Botmill.com – NOT COOL”

  1. That’s horrible, if they were going to steal a blog post, steal HydroRaptor posts, not that drivel…. :) joking!

  2. I totally agree. If you’re going to steal something, steal something of significance. They’ve even stolen my rambling posts droning on about WordPress theme woes. Stealing a post from a second rate blog like this… well, it just makes both of us look bad.

  4. I think it’s mostly inproperly configured syndication. You can automatically have WordPress syndicate through some plugins. Apparantly they didn’t use one that points you to the source article (plus it takes the whole article instead of an exerpt). Doesn’t make it any less wrong whether its automated, except for that they may have forgotten about it. They might use it to increase search engine rankings (relevant topic that they want to be found by), though more links pointing outward than inward will effectively reduce them.

  5. Hi Everyone,

    Obviously we mean no harm to anyone. As previously stated in the last MakerBlock post about us…We are still working out the kinks in the aggregator. It is incredibly important to us to know as much as possible as to whats going on. Please be patient with us as we are still putting the basis to BotMill together.

    Regards,

    BotMill Support

  6. Hi MakerBlock and the rest of the community,

    Please note that I handle the BotMill day to day business dealings and this has been brought to my attention by our support team.
    As we absolutely do not want to cause any waves with anyone, I have instructed our tech guy to completely stop the aggregator. I think all the responses in this blog have been correct. 3d-printer-parts has also been halted and instead redirected to BotMill.com.

    Blog posts should only be quality and BotMill related if on the BotMill blog.

    I hope this shows that we only want to provide quality products and service and do have a dedication to the community.

    I can be contacted with any questions at gil@botmill.com

    Sincerely,

    Gil Mayron
    BotMill.com

  8. @Erik: This is all a moot point if they take down their robo-blog. There’s a continuum of acceptableness when it comes to syndicating other’s content. At best you provide a one line summary and link to their content giving them attribution. At worst you copy their entire content and republish it as your own.
    You’re right that having it automated doesn’t make it any more or less wrong – but there isn’t an automated way to generate a summary (for now) and if you’re going to republish others’ work as your own an automated system can accomplish this in seconds.
    As for the reasons for using a robo-blog – search engines penalize duplicate content. And, really, if people can tell it’s a robo-blog they’re not likely to read it.

  9. Bot mill is a terrible company with bad costumer service. After 2 months they never sent an email to tell me what was going on and I had to contact them myself and hear excuses after excuses luckily I was able to cancel my payments and get the money back

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