A blogging interlude
Blogkeeping, Photos — By Adele on 30 April, 2008 6:53 pmIf you don’t have a Worpress blog, this post will be of no interest for you, other than the last part (where I post a spanking photo to make up for off-topic rambling. Scroll right down if that’s the case.)
If you are a blogger, you may have faced with so-called “RSS scraping”, which is when spammers steal the content from your blog and surround it with their own ads. This is aggravating for two reasons: firstly, the arseholes are making money from your hard work, and secondly, they create duplicate content, which compromises you in the eyes of Google. Not good all around.
The easiest way to deal with the problem is to publish a partial feed on your site, and plenty of big blogs do exactly that. I’ve always been reluctant to go down the partial-feed route, because as a blog reader I don’t like them. So I won’t do unto my readers what I don’t like done unto me.
Anyway, having caught another splogger this evening, I went digging for a solution, and found a nifty WordPress plugin that will poison the well for any future plagiarists. AntiLeech is supposed to send scrambled content to spammers after they’re identified – so I can still publish my full feed, but if it’s scraped, it becomes illegible. Cool, huh?
I haven’t tested it yet, but it looks pretty sweet. I thought you other WordPress users might want to know about it as well.
And now, a spanking picture to make up for all that geek talk.
Actually, I’m feeling generous; have two:
Oh, what the hell, have three.
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5 Comments
Google blogger (at the moment) not WordPress but I read you article with dread. I have not installed an RSS feed on my blog but would like to know if blogs without RSS feeds are still vulnerable to this? How do you find out if somebody is doing this to a blog?
Prefectdt
All Blogger blogs have RSS and Atom feeds generated automatically, and so does yours. So yes, theoretically you’re vulnerable.
I usually catch the scrapers by accident, when I write something (say Post A.) that links to one of my older posts (Post B). When the scraper copies Post A, he also inadvertently links to Post B, and I find an incoming link from him. There might be a more sophisticated way of finding out about this, but I don’t know it.
Previously I dealt with the problem by writing to the scrapers’ hosting company and having their sites taken down, but with AntiLeech I may not have to bother any more. If it works.
Thanks very much for the info, I will keep a close eye on the “came from” section of the stat thingy.
Prefectdt
I don’t blog myself but I wish you he best in your spam war. Give ‘em hell!
A bare bottomed spanking of a hot young wench with switch marks, aaaahhhhh! How nice. Thanks for posting it.
I hate the idea of going to partial RSS so I have been using AntiLeech plugin for months. It has cut down the false trackbacks I’ve gotten immensely so I assume it’s working. The only way to test it is to get an RSS scraper and scrape your blog. (Not something I want to do.) With the plugin I did notice my stats drop almost sharply due to the scrapers not being able to steal my content.
Best of luck with it!