My First Experience with Splogging (Spam Blogging or Stealing Blog Content)
Posted by Moses on Feb 10, 2007
Tonight has been an interesting night. Tonight I published a much delayed article, Joining the Open Source Tidal Wave: Part 2, and I was quite pleased with myself for getting it out. I published like I normally do, I sent trackbacks to articles that I referenced and waited for the traffic to roll in :-). Just kidding. I did post trackbacks and when I went to check my trackback at one of the sites I discovered another trackback above my own with the same title. At first I was pretty confused. After a minute or so I realized that someone had stolen my content. I wasn’t quite sure how it happened so I did a little research via google and discovered the topic of splogging. As a fairly new blogger I didn’t realize that splogging was such a common practice.
Here’s how it works, someone stands up a site and through the use of automated tools they aggregate the RSS feeds from a number of different sites. I have found cases where entire sites were stolen. Sploggers put the content on their own websites with some advertisements from programs like Google’s AdSense and viola an instant money maker that cost almost nothing to put together.
You would think that in the unregulated world of the Internet there is little that can be done to stop these criminals. There are some steps to be taken. As you can imagine because some many blogs have been affected (one splogger was aggregating content from over 14,000 blogs), the blog community has identifed some steps to take to protect themselves. I won’t repeat what’s been written, but the bloggers below offer some effective tips for combating this menace.
Articles to Teach You What to do About Your Stolen Content
- Lorelle on Wordpress - What to do When Someone Steals Your Content (very detailed)
- The Tog - How to Stop People From Stealing Your Blogs Content
- Contentious - Shutting Down Sploggers via Google AdSense
In addition to the advice suggested in those blogs, you can search for sploggers on splog spot. And, Owen at Asymptomatic has provided wordpress users with a more proactive solution to address splogging, his AntiLeech plugin for wordpress. I’ve just installed it so I can’t comment on its effectiveness, but there seems to be a number of people who are happy with it according to the on-going conversation here.
Of course this is the blog community so as I’ve learned everything wouldn’t be right with the universe if there wasn’t some controversy. AmyG at Contentious wrote the Shutting Down Sploggers via Google AdSense on 9/26/2006, but on 9/22/2006 she wrote that hunting sploggers is a waste of energy. Folks at raving lunacy strongly disagree with her. I have to agree with the folks at raving lunacy. There is a famous quote about evil and good men that goes something like “evil can only prosper when good men do nothing.” I refuse to just sit by and take it. I will follow the steps outlined in Lorelle’s and others blogs and see if I can get this site to stop stealing content. I will keep everyone posted expect a follow-up soon. For those who are curious my first step will be to inform the blogger whose feed is obviously being read by a splogger that he has a problem.
Learn More
- Plagrism Today has a series of articles on splogging and scrapping beginning with Behind Splogging: Why Sploggers Splog
- Spoken-for.org had the entire site splogged find out more here.
Trackback URL for this post.
Welcome to the world of splogs. Yes, it takes seconds for someone to steal your content, and a long time to stop them. But it can be done.
For those who consider it a waste of time to fight back, these are probably the people who give up on a lot of things in their lives, though they will probably deny it.
My philosophy as always been that if I don’t do the right thing, who will? Fighting back against comment spam, copyright violations, splogs, and such aren’t for me. They are for everyone who doesn’t fight back, who gives up, who thinks they can’t win - they don’t, so I have to. It’s the right things to do.
It isn’t that I’m a noble cause person. It’s just the right thing to do. Treat it as what you are supposed to do, and you do it. Just because it’s right.
Go for it and good luck. Don’t give up. Fight for those who do!
PS: The anti-spam CAPTHCA doesn’t work. I’ve tried three, now four times to get through. These things never work and are a pain to those who want to comment.
Lorrelle,
Thanks for the encouragement. I was shocked when my content was stolen. I agree that it’s the write thing to do.
Thanks for the heads up about the anti-spam tool. I turned off the plugin.