Ah! All my sites are getting hit heavy by sploggers!
Ok, according to this definition I’m being hit by a combination of Splogger and Scraper sites:
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.
Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either Inauthentic Text or merely stolen from other websites. These blogs usually contain an high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
Ever since I started my blogs I’ve had sites copying my posts – some giving a link back to the original post, others not linking back at all. However, since December or so this problem has increased. In fact it’s been so bad in the last two weeks that my husband and I have had at least 100 posts stolen from our sites.
I get a pingback from the sites that include our post links in their stolen copy of our posts – that’s the main way that I’ve been finding these sites.
I call them sploggers because of course the sites are full of adsense ads – so they are trying to build a site artificially to gain traffic in order to scam adsense and make some money by using other peoples content to earn money. However, technically, they are scraper sites – as in bottom feeders – because they are gathering content from our sites rss feeds.
This site has only had a few posts stolen that I’m aware of, but my gardening site, my celebrity blog, and my husbands two sites – Odd Planet and Guitar licks have been hit hard.
Yesterday, after a combo splogger / scraper site stole 10 posts from Celebrity Scoop I decided to fight back.
Ok, just to back up for a second. I have been fighting back by reporting these sites as spam to google, and by doing a whois search on their domain name to find out who the sites web host is, and sometimes even the sploggers email address.
Alright … fighting back … I created a graphic last night. A big red stop sign that says “Stop stealing my site feed”, and created a post, that when copied on the splog site would notify anyone viewing the site that they are reading stolen information. Check out my “Take back the Net – Stop copyright Thieves” post on Celebrity Scoop.
We have to stop these sites.
The more duplicates of our posts out there, the higher the chance that google will take OUR sites off their index as a penalty for duplicate content. It could even affect our page ranks too. Not to mention the whole copyright violation and even bandwidth stealing (if they are hot-linking to an image in your post) problem.
Other than turning off our RSS feeds how else can we stop these thieving sites? I’d love to hear some ideas.
That’s scary! I haven’t had this problem yet (and I hope I never will), but I would guess the best way would be to turn off hotlinking and maybe sign each post with a 6pt. copyright?