Sploggers Stole Your Content? Here Some Great Ways To Fight With Splogs.
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Splog is a spam blog which steal content from other blogs, in many cases they never refer to original source and take a full credit for a story or content. There are three major types of splogs: splog made to generate traffic and make money from affiliate & pay-per-click programs (Google AdWords, AdBrite, Yahoo Ads, Bidvertiser etc), splogs to generate traffic and redirect users to other websites and services, splogs to fill content with different links for SEO purposes.
Recently I discovered that several blog posts I wrote appeared on some other blog. It was obvious that my best & the most popular posts were picked by hand and copied word to word. I was lucky to discover that guy information was listed on Whois when I checked his domain, can you imagine! This jackass never put privacy on his 100% illegal site. So, I emailed him:
Dear XXXXXX owners, We found that you copied content from our website without permission. Article which appeared on the pages: ……… , ……. , ……. , etc. doesn’t belong to you. We would like to offer you a settlement: If you pay settlement $70 000 by October 1, 2009 we will forget this story and it will never go to Massachusetts or Florida State court… otherwise we would like to claim $1 570 000 in damages.
Whole email seems like a joke but guy replied in less than 20 minutes:
Sergey Rusak, Not sure what you are referring to here article wise. The blog in question no longer exists. That blog was an experiment as to how blogging worked for my 13 years of age daughter. It was never submitted to search engines or was it intended to be.
Yeah right! What a smart 13 years old who stuff Google Adwords banners all over the screen andinterested in Wordpress scripts, SEO stuff, and direct marketing. Also, new “quality” web directory was born under the same domain right after blog (oops, I ment to say splog) died.
As you see, it is perfect example on how to protect your content from sploggers. Of course I was lucky to find this guy because he was stupid and did not have any experience. I guess it was his first splog he opened reading some eBook on “How to make a fortune with Google AdWords”. But what if you deal with experienced sploggers who hide their identity? Here some tricks:
How to protect your blog from sploggers:
- Don’t allow RSS Feeds to publish your whole post. Use features to publish only preview with read the rest link. Most sploggers steal content automatically from RSS Feeds.
- In some cases you can block copy-paste feature on your blog. Dynamic Drive provides script which help to disable right click.
- Post Copyright information in your posts or on the footer of your blog. It is not working well because most sploggers don’t really care, but it can help a little and reduce amount of people actually visit to copy and paste your content.
- Make sure your entire content does not appear in social sites like MyBlogLog, Zimbio, Squidoo etc. Disable this feature by logging in to your accounts.
- If you have Wordpress blog you can use some plugins to combat splogs.
If your content already stolen…
- Try to find who did it and contact this person like I did in the example above. Come inexperienced sploggers leave comment field, contact form, or even their email.
- Use Whois to find who registered splog. Some sploggers don’t add provacy to save money on domain registration.
- If some idiot runs a splog he might leave his contact information thinking that someone will actually contact him to offer a job, money to advertise, or link exchange. Go through different pages and see if you can find any information.
- Take a look on domain where splog hosted. In many cases it will be sub-domain or sub-folder. Go to domain itself and see what kind of a website it is. Some companies might be not aware that someone host a splog on their server. Contact them and explain situation.
Report it to Google
- Unfortunately some splogs are indexed by Google and it cause content duplication for your blog (it can actually hurt your blog!). Use “Help us improve” link on Google under search results to complain about splog if it listed in search index.
- Report Copyright Infringement to Google.
