Help! someone’s stealing my blog posts!

Yesterday, I became a victim of splogging.

After blogging for three years, I was actually quite thrilled. Someone actually found my posts worth “stealing”!

Wikipedia describes “splogs” as:

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites.

The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.

Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either Inauthentic Text or merely stolen (see blog scraping) from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

I discovered I had been “splogged” completely by chance.  At some point yesterday, I saw four links back to my posts from a single site – all within the space of a few minutes.

This was clearly an “admirer”! Curiously, the site that the links came from did not remotely looked like it might have anything to with issues that I cover. What I really saw were a lot of Google ads.

Not only was the site unrelated to what I usually write about – worse, the posts were reproduced – in full – without any links or acknowledgement of the source.

Now I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery etc…but this was not imitation – it was plagiarism…or simply put – “stealing”.

Like most other bloggers, I protect my stuff under the Creative Commons license and am more than happy for people to share it or otherwise publicise it…but it does make me angry when people do not attribute or cite their source(s).

If you think splogging – or blog scraping – which is what happened to me – is a minor issue, think again.

Here is a relatively well-known incident that happened about two years ago to Poscaster Erik Marcus. Read it here in full – in his own words. As a bonus, it also has a comment from George Lambert who is “the person accused of being the worlds first podjacker” detailing his “side of the story!”

After a little bit of diligent search on the web, I came across Lorelle’s guide on how to fight spam blogging…Taking a cue from her, here is what I am considering writing to the site owner.

Dear Sir/ Madam,

It has been brought to my notice that you have recently reproduced written content and some recent posts from my blog on your website without attribution or acknowledgement and link back to the source.

I would urge you to reconsider your actions and either remove these cross-posts or acknowledge the source and provide a link back to my main blog.

I look forward to hearing from you and I trust that you will do the needful.

Sincerely,
B Shantanu

I hope this is the last I hear of it. If not, I have an interesting series of posts coming up…

I am certain that at least some folks on DesiCritics (and on BlogCritics) must have faced  this issue before. I wonder how they dealt with it.

Look forward to hearing from others who may have had a similar experience and other views/ideas.

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For more on this, see the wikipedia entry on Splogs

Here is a fellow sufferer’s tale and here is a fascinating post on Why Sploggers Splog!

Finally, here is a post by Colette Vogele on some of the legal implications of RSS hijacking.

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P.S. I just realised that I am now in the elite company of bloggers like Om Malik.  That can’t be bad! 🙂