6 Ways to Deal with Spam Blogs
January 16, 2008
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Anyone who has been blogging for more than 90 days or so has likely seen their work sucked up and re-appropriated on a spam blog. (In fact, I’m pretty sure this article will end up on one or more, ironically.) I noticed on Twitter the other day someone asking how to deal with this people, who use your hard work to improve their keyword positioning. They are most certainly thieves. Some thoughts:
Two kinds of sploggers
There are two kinds of folks, in my view. Those who write stuff like, “Lisa McNeill at Ignite Social Media had an interesting post today”: and then copies all or part of the post. These folks are clearly keyword stealers, but at least they are giving credit for the work IF they provide a backlink. It’s frustrating, but in the digital age, content aggregation is becoming the norm.
The fully repugnant ones are the scrapers. They fully act like your content is their content, even when they give backlinks. Often the effort they put into making it seem like this was their content? Lisa’s name becomes a link to their site. The headline is a link to their site. Some don’t even give us the “About Ignite Social Media” and the link at the end.
Top 5 Ways to Deal with Sploggers
- Decide how much time this is worth to you. You can spend your life chasing these idiots, you can ignore it, or you can do something in between.
- Use internal links to your site within your post. If nothing else, sploggers are a reason for including internal links to your site within your posts. If they have high SEO and you can embed a link to yourself within it, at least there can be a payoff. This is often easy to do as your posts are building off earlier concepts anyway.
- Use a footer that states that the content is yours. Some folks recommend putting a copyright disclaimer at the end, others prefer a creative commons approach. There’s a WordPress plugin that puts copyright at the end of your posts. I haven’t tried it yet, but plan to check it out today. If it’s not good, someone let me know.
- Contact the site owner. The next couple of ideas come from a good post by Joel Burslem on this topic. He’s a bit more aggressive than I am on this, but he has good ideas. The first of which is to email them and tell them to stop. It could work for sploggers who still have a soul. (Doesn’t seem to have worked for Joel, but he did get his splogger to pilfer and post an article calling himself a thief.)
- Report them to Google. I learned from Joel that you can report people by clicking on the Ads by Google link on the offending site, then “Tell Google What You Thought About These Ads” and then “Report a Violation.”
- Use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even Joel says he hasn’t gone this far yet, but he does note that it is possible to use the DMCA to hit these folks.
Those are some initial thoughts, half mine, half Joel’s to help you begin to deal with these folks. My personal favorite (since it’s easy and can help your site’s authority) is the internal linking within a post. This doesn’t need to be conspicuous or repetitive, but it can be done within the natural flow of the conversation.
I’m sure people smarter than me have thought of many other ways. What else works? Or do you ignore these folks, as we often do?
UPDATE 1: I just learned that one of the examples I cited was in fact part of a larger content sharing partnership that we willingly participate in. I didn’t realize they were a partner of my partner. Boy is my face red… I’ve deleted the reference to them, with my apologies. As we all know, there are countless others who are just stealing, as your comments below attest to…
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13 Responses to “6 Ways to Deal with Spam Blogs”
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My blog is just starting to gain some significant attention, and have found these “sploggers” stealing my content and placing it on their own site. If they link back to me somewhere and give me credit by name, I’m not usually bothered. Yes, even if their monetizing my content by using AdSense. I know it’s not right, but there’s only so much we can do, and at least this person had the decency to stick my name on it.
What I don’t understand is when people say “Edward Jones had an interesting post today, here’s an excerpt:” and then they paste my entire post right there, and link back to me, clearly indicating that it was not created by Edward Jones. I have a feeling a lot of these “sploggers” out there don’t even work with the content…they have bots put it together and post it for them.
I tend to ignore these types of post, at least for now. I have enough on my plate at the moment, and don’t think my time is worth the effort of shutting down these people, as I don’t believe it’s hurting me all that bad…yet.
Thanks for the post! I enjoyed it!
[…] 6 Ways to Deal with Spam Blogs […]
Another thing you can do is put in your terms and conditions that your RSS feeds are for RSS readers only and not to be redistributed in any way.
I’m playing with one as we speak. Indian SEO company that just so happened so share their company name on the end of my entry(on their blog)…and just so happens to have their Yahoo screenname at the end of their website…and just so happens to have a lot of spammy backlinks
I’ve seen some of these splogs lately where they will link to my blog post, but credit the post to a completely different author. As I looked through the “blog” I saw they had done the same thing with every post. They have a database of well-known SEOs and mix and match names with new blog posts they scrape off of random blogs.
@ Dave. Oh man, that is LOW. This is just one of the reasons that some bad apples give SEO a bad name.
@SlightlyShady: how hard are you going to work to get them to stop? It’s a tough call…
@Matt: Good idea. We’re actually adding that to our blog, with a Creative Commons footer.
@Erica: I usually ignore them too. If I were in a different industry, I might not though. But I’m going to try to include at least one internal link from now on…
[…] 6 Ways to Deal with Spam Blogs : Ignite Social Media Anyone who has been blogging for more than 90 days or so has likely seen their work sucked up and re-appropriated on a spam blog. (tags: Spam Blogs ????? splog) […]
[…] read Jim Tobin’s advice on 6 ways to deal with spam blogs. After all, as nice as the extra incoming links are, it’s still better to put these splogs […]
I usually don’t bother with scrapers, but one day I noticed that a Yahoo Group that I’m a part of was being scraped and personal information (like group meetings and who was attending) was being placed on the blog. We reported it to Yahoo and the group manager changed settings around. So it’s not just blogs that get scraped!
[…] read Jim Tobin’s advice on 6 ways to deal with spam blogs. After all, as nice as the extra incoming links are, it’s still better to put these splogs […]
Jim, when you agree to having your content syndicated across a network of sites such as a blog partnership that includes InsideOffce, I don’t think that can be considered scraping. Especially when Lisa McNeill herself supplies the picture and bio.
@Chris: You are absolutely right. I didn’t realize they were part of the iEntry partnership. I’ve deleted the incorrect reference/link to Inside Office, with my apologies, and updated the article to reflect that I’d made a poor choice. Thanks for letting me know of my mistake. ~Jim
Thank you for the update Jim. Much appreciated!