Some people learn the hard way, and some need convincing before giving credit for content. Luckily, an htaccess fix (more here) and certain wordpress plugins will defend your site, but nothing’s foolproof.
Back in ‘06, Lorelle armed us with ways to fight splogs and scrapers, Splog Reporter is was a good service, and Bitacle was mostly neutered (peep that theme!), but these assholes seem to be multiplying. So where does it end? Miriam at Wordpress Garage is wondering the same thing.
Hope that Adsense chump-change is worth it!
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Great post - and some good ideas in the links on how to fight this.
It seems to me industry leaders like Google (that host free Blogs on Blogger) need to play a bigger role - given that majority of Blogger stuff is spam.
Of course there is some conflict of interest for them.
--January 15, 2008 @ 1:19 pmFIrst off, I agree that these sites are multiplying. But why wouldn’t they? All it takes is a script to set up a few thousand at a time. The nature of the beast is that they are much easier to create than close.
If you need any help with a specific case though, let me know. It is the least I can do after all you’ve helped me.
Speaking of which… That is cheating! “Peep that theme”, it’s Mimbo! Promoting your own work on the sly I see… lol
Seriously, thanks for the great theme. It took some customization to make it work for my sitebut it was remarkably flexible. Thank you very much for your hard work in this area! You’ve done more to improve Plagiarism Today than, well, probably even me.
Thank you.
--January 15, 2008 @ 7:47 pmDarren - I can’t believe you had to convince the Bee guys to give you credit! Their post was almost exactly the same as yours. That’s major chutzpah.
Those are really good tips you have in this post, and I’ve learned a lot about fighting splogs since I wrote the post you referred to here (thanks!). I’m going to write a round-up of strategies bloggers can use to fight sploggers, but I’m afraid that even with all these tricks and hacks, the sploggers will still have the upper hand.
I would say that maybe we should see this as a case of “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” but this is plain ol’ stealing that can even do serious harm if Google penalizes us for duplicate content.
--January 16, 2008 @ 3:54 amOh, and by the way, that blog in the image above that was scraping your content was scraping mine too. I was looking at the other posts being scraped, and I thought “Wow, that blogger is writing some really interesting stuff. I’ve gotta find out who they are.” I guess it was you, but I couldn’t find any links in any of the posts back to your blog.
So may I make a suggestion - you should really put a footer on your feeds with a copyright notice and a link back to your blog. I just found a plugin that even allows you to automatically have a link back to the specific post. This way, if people are reading your content elsewhere, at least they can find you easily. It’s kind of a silver lining.
--January 16, 2008 @ 3:58 amGreat article. Learned a lot that I didn’t know. Implemented most of these suggestions last night.
--January 17, 2008 @ 9:04 am