Spinning Spammers: The New Breed Of Splogs
It seems there’s a new breed of sploggers as noted by Lorelle on her Spinning Spammers article. Content is scraped from WordPress blogs and certain keywords are replaced with synonyms. The result is a new post identical to your original article with different keywords.
This means that it will be harder for Google to detect it as a duplicate post and could even give it a higher rank than your original post.
If you happen to be one of the victims, Jonathan Bailey has some tips for fighting Spinning Spammers.You could also check out Lorelle’s excellent advice on what you should do when someone steals your content. Let’s get the word out.
Technorati Tags: Plagiarism, Content Theft
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November 16th, 2007 01:00
Oh no, they’re getting smarter, lol. I have so much content stolen I don’t even get upset about it anymore. More reviews get stolen then anything else…go figure…
Hope you’re having a good day Brown!
Christy’s last blog post..It’s The Buzz Of The Blogosphere
November 16th, 2007 01:06
@Christy:
Scrapers like your reviews I guess lol.
November 16th, 2007 01:38
Thanks for helping to spread the word. We have to keep an eye on these evil doers because I think that together, we are smarter than they are.
Lorelle’s last blog post..Blog Challenge: Shopping Experiences
November 16th, 2007 01:54
It’s annoying my content is always getting scraped on all my websites! Gah! As soon as I post my content will be scraped within an hour.
Another thing I’ve seen is scrapers will refer to your post but use someone else’s name as the author. Have you seen that?
Opal Tribble’s last blog post..Do You Want To Be A Successful Blogger? Be The Blog
November 16th, 2007 02:11
@Lorelle:
I’m just waiting for a splog to name itself Prosplogger hehe. Thanks for the heads up
@Opal:
That’s one of the most common splogs that scrape my content. Sometimes they don’t change anything but most of the time it says “insert name here” wrote an interesting blah blah ..
They’re everywhere
November 16th, 2007 02:23
I just installed AntiLeech let’s see how that works. I had just written a post on my cooking website and the content has already been scraped. That was just an update to say hey I have a new WP theme however the scraper has adsense installed and I saw they are making the rounds scraping other cooking websites. Just my luck they found me from my review website. I feel so “special”.
Opal Tribble’s last blog post..Do You Want To Be A Successful Blogger? Be The Blog
November 16th, 2007 02:27
@Opal:
That AntiLeech sounds interesting. I wonder if they have a top10 too
November 16th, 2007 05:47
Hey Baron,
That’s pretty interesting. A couple weeks ago, I noticed a linkback to one of my blogs and come to find out, someone had taken one of my posts and placed it on their blog. I recognized the title, and it was credited to me, BUT (and here’s the kicker), I don’t know if they changed any words or not because it was all written in German.
It’s kind of hard to catch someone doing this if they’re writing in a foreign language.
Christine Senter’s last blog post..I?ve reached the 20K mark
November 16th, 2007 06:51
Did anyone take a look at the resulting posts? They’re incomprehensible. Is there really any fear that the scraped article is going to be valued more than the original?
November 16th, 2007 07:15
First off, thanks for helping to get the word out! It’s greatly appreciated.
If anyone has a case that they are struggling with, please send me an email and I’ll gladly have a look at it. I know how frustrating these can be.
Christy: Probably has to do with the keywords in your reviews. You might want to better target the services you ping after you submit a post to reduce that.
Opal: I’ve seen it several times, often due to poorly set up splogging software. Other times it is intentional though, in a bid to steer the search engines away from your site and give them a better chance.
As far as Antileech goes, I’ve heard good and bad about it. Also look into Copyfeed though.
Brown Baron: Great, you just gave them the idea. Now Prosplogger will be a site by the end of the week!
Christine: Actually, it isn’t that hard. What you need to do is add a digital fingerprint to your posts. Those can’t be translated and are easily searched. They survive most any kinds of modification. You can read about them in my post linked in the main article.
Mike: If search engines weren’t so inept at telling real content from fake content, the answer would be no. It truly is sad how easily Google is duped these days. The answer, despite the gibberish, is yes, there is a real worry.
Jonathan Bailey’s last blog post..Is Trademark the New Copyright?
November 16th, 2007 08:44
@Christine:
That’s true. Of course, you could always have it translated
@mike:
Unfortunately, it happens a lot of times with search engines.
@Jonathan:
Thanks for the offer. I’ll probably be sending a couple of friends your way soon.
You know, splogs should have their own hosting. Something like splogspot.com hehe.
November 16th, 2007 09:56
Brown Baron: I thought blogspot.com was already their hosting… oh, wait, you said splogspot. Heh, misread that, easy to see the mistake as everything on the previous is pretty much spam already.
Perhaps the solution then isn’t a new host, but just a rename of the current one…
Definitely send them my way if I can help!
Jonathan Bailey’s last blog post..Is Trademark the New Copyright?
November 16th, 2007 10:41
Them scum bags…… I wish I had more to add…….
November 17th, 2007 00:14
@ Brown Baron
Splogspot, I like that. I also like Prosplogger.
@Johnathan Bailey,
I had the copy feed installed then I deactivated it when I was trying to figure out what plug in was causing the issue of course I forgot to reactivate it. That has been fixed.
Opal Tribble’s last blog post..Do You Want To Be A Successful Blogger? Be The Blog
November 17th, 2007 00:50
Needless to say, great article. And more to the point, great links to some great posts on the subject. I’m looking forward to trying some stuff that those articles suggest. *nod*
Bush Mackel’s last blog post..New Design
November 17th, 2007 03:07
@Forest:
Lol
@Opal:
It has a nice ring to it
@Bush:
I think that the term ’splog’ will become a dirty word soon hehe