Hey guys. Lately I've been noticing an increase in spammy blogs linking to individual posts of mine. They all have this structure: So-and-so have written this great post: [short excerpt from my post]. Read the rest here. (The text "here" is linked to the post.) I know they are most likely using RSS scrapers because about an hour or two after I've posted my new post I get a trackback from one of these splogs. I've been marking these as spam in my Wordpress installation but what else can I do? Some of them aren't even using Adsense so I can't even report them that way. I know Google dislikes links from "bad neighbourhoods" so this may go a little towards explaining my drastic PR dropping (along with using TLA) from 4 to 2, and then to zero. Any ideas whether there are plugins available for Wordpress that will help this situation? I am currently using Bad Behaviour and Spam-Karma 2. If not, how do you deal with it? Thanks.
@a-humblekid: I know Akismet and other anti-spam plugins can stop and remove the trackback from our sites, but the splog is still linking to us. That is what I'm concerned about - I don't want to be linked by these sites. I'm just wondering what else can we do? Or is this a pointless exercise and we should just concentrate on other stuff instead?
If i find someone copying my content I do several things, i macro their adsense and have my browser click on adsense for over 24 hours. Then look them up on whois contact their host tell them they are stealing copyrighted material, get them to remove the site. Then physically delete their backups and their sites, and any other sites they control. If none of that works I will send them a letter containing the words I am suing you. If they are constantly scraping my content I will just redirect their IP to work in my advantage piling their site with links, either getting really good backlinks or having google think their a linkfarm.
I implement it and it does not worked as great as it should be working. The one function that I see is a small AntiLeech word in my feeds and that's all. No harm will be done to the leeching site.
Your best defense against splogs is to be vigilant and to send their hosts a DMCA takedown notice, followed by a DMCA complaint notice to the four major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com). Note though that as far as the hosts are concerned, they need to be in the US since the DMCA is an American law (not covered by the Berne convention the last time I checked, which is an international treaty on copyright protection recognition).
First off, if someone is getting info from an RSS feed, they would be in there right to repost that with a link back to the original article (from what I've learned). Think about this, you submit your feed to google or yahoo, they read your feed and display the results on their page, which in turn is your title and summary, with a link back to your site. Problem is, you need to take the content out of your posts and onto another page, or use a tag that splits your post into 2 sections. or.. Are you talking about people coming to your site taking a "short excerpt" and then posting a link. These are 2 different issues. Think about it for a second, this is pretty much what slashdot.com does in a way. If there is a site out there that can rank better than you, and is able to bring traffic directly to you, take it. I would worry more about this if these people come to your site and copied entire pages, then you have a problem. Do a test, make a post that make no sense whatsoever and see if they link it, you'll know for sure if they are automating it. If I have gotten any of this info wrong, please clue me in. here's something from yahoo about RSS "Another way many people use RSS feeds is by incorporating content into weblogs, or "blogs". Blogs are web pages comprised of usually short, frequently updated items and web links. Blogging as a publishing tool is used for many purposes: traditional journalism, personal journals, group discussions around a topic, and many combinations in-between. " Google pretty much reads the same thing.