What do you do?

I have just been into the comments in moderation on one of my blogs and apart from the usual spam I came across a handful of what looked like strange comments.

So, I followed the URL and what I found was this:

The remote site looked to be grabbing my RSS feed and publishing it on their site. When you clicked on the Article header from the summary page to go to the article page I found that all that was published was the RSS info and a single line "original post by xxx and software by yyy" the xxx was a link back to my site and the yyy was also a link to another site.

The particular site I ended up on appeared to be sucking the RSS feeds from about a dozen blogs and posting the same thing. I am guessing it is all 100% automated.

By following the yyy link I then find out that this particular person is doing the same with at least another 17 blog sites. They have a "splog network" siponing off bloggers hard work to generate literally hundreds (thousands) of those yyy links pointing to a site.

My question: should I just forget about this and accept that every time this person grabs my feed I get a backlink for my blog or challenge them and ask why they are using my unique content and re-publishing it without my permission.

I am torn between leaving it out there and possibly benefitting from the link (not sure what dupe penalties may apply - time will tell) and requesting that it be removed so my unique content remains my unique content.

What would/do you do?

 

I see this a lot and like you I often wonder what to do. My blog is pretty strong in the search engines so if there's a duplicate content issue I think it will effect the splog rather than my site. So if there's a decent link back to me I'll generally just ignore it, otherwise I'll contact the site owner complaining of copyright violation and threaten further action (fortunately my content has normally been removed so I haven't had to follow through).

 

tks dct.

What I have noticed is the way that this looks from an incoming link POV.

A few quick google searches indicate that there are around 1Million pages with the "original post by xxx and software by yyy" all funneling PR to the yyy site. I guess that they are hoping that the comments actually get posted by the originating blog owner as well which would add a further pyramid of up to another 1million+ links pointing to their splogs!

I would probably call this type of technique (dark) grey at best, but the main site is PR7 and they are selling TextLinkAds on their page. Now TLA on a PR7 means probably $100 per TLA on their site.

I think it is time to get their site taken down and notify their advertisers of what sort of network they are.

 

I also would describe it as dark grey. The issue is that they are operating similarly to a aggregator in that they usually only show the summary(at least the ones I've noticed). The other thing that I've done is to delete the trackback link when it hits. I get a link from them, but they don't get a link from me. Eliminates the issue of reciprocal link hit in the SE.
As for duplicate content, if it's just a summary, I don't think it's much of a problem. If it's the whole post, it could present a much more serious problem down the road.

Obviously, it is all done for profit and if you feel uncomfortable taking the link and letting them use a little of your content to profit in exchange then by all means take em down.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

I have not had any response from any party regarding taking the content down so I have taken the matter into my own hands.

I wrote a couple of simple scripts that will put random, semi unique content into his blog along with a message that the content is stolen. Additionally, I am making sure that the anchor text of the incoming link is beneficial to me.

The solution only took an hour or so to put together, and I have stopped this abuser in his tracks!

I do not want to post the URL of this scumbag, but if anyone else is having a similar problem, just PM me and I might be willing to share the solution I used!

 

Sounds like Elliot B*ck to me.He's been doing that to my feed for at least the past 6 months. Can't say that anything either good or bad has happened from it.

 

Yep - that is him alright!

PM me if you would like to see what I have done to fill his splog with sh*t - and made sure that I get several backlinks from his domain with my choice of keywords. I am willing to share the code if you want to do the same - just ask.

 

I'd be really interested to know what solution you used! I haven't noticed my feeds being used, yet.

 

if they are ripping your articles, chances are they are also ripping any links from with-in the post too, if you like me inter-link blog post, with in text of the post, it will turn out your getting free links and if google has already indexed your post first then you wshould get hit with dupe content penalty.

 

The good news is that after I created a faked feed for this scumbag, and he sucked in over 50 "articles" into his site within a day or so, he has now stopped his theiving ways and actually stopped his theft from my blog.

So, where a complaint didn't resolve the issue - providing some unique content for his blog got his attention and the result I was looking for.

J4T - No, they were not re-posting my whole articles, just what was in the RSS feed and even then, they were stripping out any links in the text.


And for the record, the site that was sucking my feed was "guidesandreviews dot com" ( I don't want to give him any links)

and a screenshot I took after he had decided to suck my feed and post around 30 "articles" from my fake feed that was randomly generated, but included my message to him.

 

Haha .. good job. Judging from the pic, the sucker got pwned good