Join the anti-splog vigilante brigade
Posted 16 February 2007, by Aaron
Question: What is the difference between this blog posting, and my Top 10 plugins for a WordPress newbie post?
Answer: The first post is owned by a thieving scumbag splogger.
A ’splog’, as defined by whatis.com, is “a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated Web sites, with the intent of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic… they have no original content, featuring either nonsense or content stolen from authentic Web sites.”
So put simply, the owner of the above site (amongst others I haven’t listed) has ripped my posts, word for word, and used them in their own blog in an attempt to gain traffic from search engines and subsequently cash from Google Ads. The dirty rotten filthy scumbag!
Now don’t get me wrong. I actually have a fairly relaxed attitude to copyright infringement. I’m certainly not precious about my own material and, if anything, I actually get a buzz from knowing other people might be using my work in some way. And I wouldn’t put anything up on the Internet if I wanted to avoid the potential for it being copied.
However, something bugs me about knowing that spam-fiends out there might be making a few quid from sitting on their backsides and STEALING my content.
So how do you find out if your blog is being stolen? Well, I initially found out when I got trackbacks from the offending splogs asking if I wanted to link to them? Er… No! You can also use Technorati to see what other blogs are linking to you, and simply looking at your server logs can highlight suspicious referrers. For a more detailed ‘how to’ have a read of Lorelle’s excellent article.
Finding these damned splog-mongers is actually the easy bit - preventing them doing it is another thing. Another excellent post by Lorelle examines the legal routes you can take. It’s a very detailed post and well worth a read. However, being a British blogger, I’m not sure how the American laws Lorelle refers to can help me, least of all when my content might be being stolen by somebody in, for instance, Azerbaijan?
There are various WordPress plugins to help in this battle, a decent round of which is covered by Plagiarism Today. The one plugin that does catch my eye is RedAlt’s AntiLeech. The reason being, is that AntiLeech not only helps you identify content thieves, but once you’ve identified them it allows you to take matters into your own hands and send them fake content.
MaxPower suggests fighting dirty by using AntiLeech to hand ‘questionable’ content to the splogs - such as profanity, racial hatred, pornography. Just the kind of stuff that Google loves to ban its Adsense users from displaying.
So, a mere two weeks into my blogging life and I’m entering a brave new world of vigilante action against spammers. AntiLeech will be my next plugin installed and I shall duly report back with findings, and hopefully examples, once I’ve nailed a few of the b*stards!
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Thanks for letting me know.
Lorelle
17 February 2007, 10:14 pm