Thursday, March 30, 2006

Stealing Content - How to Fight Splog

This is a follow up to my recent post about the psuedo blogs which are stealing content from legitimate food blogs and using it to entice people to pages loaded with ads. I have since learned that this type of thing is called SPLOG (which means spam blog) and that it is becoming more and more widespread.

If you have a way to check who is linking to you, like Technorati, I believe that a great many of you will find your content is being used in this way by this particular group. I've now seen nearly 25 of their psuedo blogs which have my content, often the same post repeated over and over on every one of their "blogs". You can identify them by their practice of using *recipe* as the final word in their "blog" names.

My brother found this site called Fight Splog which gives a lot more information about SPLOG, and also information about where to report it and how to report violations of Adsense policy to google. I hope others will join me in reporting these people.


This Post was written by Kalyn from Kalyns Kitchen.

14 comments:

Jennifer Maiser said...

Also, you can subscribe to Technorati Feeds. I have bloglines feeds that tell me whenever someone is linking to me which is super helpful.

Anonymous said...

Kalyn--thank you for your research on this issue--it looks like it is going to be one that grows, rather than diminishes, over time.

I should really keep a closer eye on folks linking and all of that.

FooDcrazEE said...

phew! search and mine is still ok..thanx for the tips

Michele said...

I'm with you Kalyn! I have lots of splog links and had no idea what to do about them. Thanks for the info!

Anonymous said...

I just found more thieves, on blogspot--they are taking stuff straight from Chez Pim, Elise's Simply Recipes and Cooking With Amy.

I flagged every last one of the blogs that this git, Povor, has up, but I am also reporting the links to Splog. I emailed Elise, too, but now that I recognize the other posts, I am going to send links to Pim and Amy as well.

These people are shameless.

Kalyn Denny said...

I'm so glad others are helping report this. I agree with Barbara, they are shameless. I've seen over 100 food blogs that I recognize on the phony "blogs" I've found.

Owen said...

This practice has actually been around for well over a year - it is just now getting to food blogs.

There is one good piece of news - there is not much money in food blog advertising - so they won't be making much off of you guys before they get shut down.

By the way the FASTEST way to get a site closed is to look it up on WHOIS, find out the hosting provider and complain directly to them about SPAM and content theft - the ISPs react MUCH faster than anyone else.

Amy Sherman said...

Owen, that's good advice UNLESS it's a blog that is hosted by Blogger. In which case you can complain to Blogger or Google AdSense and that's about it.

Guy said...

I think I'll just put Meathenge on my old 486 and anyone who wants in can dial in directly, one user at a time. That'll fixem'.

Anonymous said...

Jeez-I'm almost sorry I started to look-this stuff is everywhere. Since being poached by Allwomen Stalk, (aka "All Women's Talk"), I have found more pseudo sites than I could have dreamed of.

Thanks, Katyn, your research is greatly appreciated. It will be terrific if folks continue to be active in complaining about and fighting these creepos. I like the handy spam report to adsense, as I expect money is all the pirates are interested in.

Anonymous said...

I seem to be the latest victim of this, I'm not sure what to do about it. The person doesn't seem to be on blogger. Can someone advise me by email?

Kalyn Denny said...

Here is what I have been doing. Whenever I find a new link from one of these creeps, I follow the links until I get to their page of ads (sometimes it takes a few days before the ads appear). On that page there is a link that says "ads by google". If you click on that it gets you to a link that says something like "Tell google what you think about the ads you just saw". Choose "report a violation" from the drop down menu. Then in the space for comments I've been writing "This is not a blog. These people are stealing content from other blogs to lure people to these pages of ads."

I figure Adsense (google) has more of an incentive to shut them down than Blogger does, and it's also quick and easy to report them that way.

Anonymous said...

I finally heard back from Blogger Support in the complaint I filed over the git on blogspot.

They make it as difficult as possible to complain--and it has to be the holder of the copywritten material who complains--in writing, via snailmail or fax.

I have the entire email if anyone wants or needs it--I am going to be forwarding it to both Elise and Amy--whose work is primarily what is being used by the guy on blogspot, so they can do what needs to be done.

If other people want me to, I can either post the entire email, with their "how to complain about copyright infringement on blogger" instructions, or I can always forward it to those who request it.

Personally, I think that Blogger should have this publicly posted where people can find it, but, well, that is not how they seem to want to do things.

Peter Cherches said...

Do some of these pseudo-blogs throw popups and load spyware? That seems to be a big problem with sites that cannibalize song lyrics from other web resources. Also, there are a number of poetry websites that have cannibalized some prose poems of mine from the legitimate Library of Congress website that originally published them online. In those cases I'm not too upset, since it may bring new readers to my work. In fact, since they also aggregate related links, I've had hits on my blog through one of them. However, since they didn't have a birthdate for me, I come up somewhere between Homer & Chaucer on a chronological list of poets. They think I was born in the year zero. Ultimately, all of these sites exist to generate ad revenue from pilfered content, or worse, to load spyware.