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Recently, I noticed that every blog is including a line at the bottom that says:

The post XXX appeared first on blog YYY

where XXX is the blog post in question and YYY is usually the post owner's blog (as opposed to someone else's blog). It looks like it is giving credit to its own blog.

My question is if there is any legal reason for doing this. Does adding this line gives the contents more protection? Or is it for other reasons such as SEO?

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  • For the SEO part, your linking to reputable sites does nothing for your own SEO. If it did, every webspam page would have the DMOZ directory of top sites... Perhaps it is a courtesy, giving the origin page some PageRank...
    – Harper - Reinstate Monica
    Sep 1, 2019 at 22:00
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    I suspect this is a response to sites that automatically rip-off content from blogs and that the blogger hopes that by including attribution in the body content the attribution will survive the rip-off process.
    – Peter Green
    Sep 1, 2019 at 22:58
  • @PeterGreen, I was thinking about this, too.
    – Tom Bennett
    Sep 2, 2019 at 1:51
  • I'm not going to say that there's no legal reason to do so, because I don't know every law out there, but I can't think of any; any other answer would likely be non-legal in nature.
    – Kevin Li
    Sep 2, 2019 at 1:52
  • @L235, is it possible that it is used to explicitly state the ownership/copyright, and thus strengthen the legal position? Unlike though, because I feel that blog owner automatically owns the blog posts.
    – Tom Bennett
    Sep 2, 2019 at 2:00

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Look at the bottom of this site - you'll find a Creative Commons "cc by-sa" license. That's Attribution Required, Share Alike. The tagline suggests that the blog is republishing similar CC-licensed content with an Attribution requirement.

So yes, it looks like the tagline is there for a contractual reason.

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  • Very interesting. For a lot of the blogs, the owner of a blog publishes a post, and add a tag line that says "This post appears on this blog first." Is it required for them to make attribution to themselves to fulfill the requirement?
    – Tom Bennett
    Sep 3, 2019 at 14:23
  • @TomBennett: No. The default position in copyright is that the author has full rights, and everyone else has only specific "fair-use" rights. As such, the author doesn't need to justify his own behavior towards anyone.
    – MSalters
    Sep 3, 2019 at 16:25

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