Protecting Your Content from Sblogs and Autoblogs
What is the point of Sblogs and Autoblogs?
Normally such sites are set up to either make a little cash through Adsense or other contextual ads, or in many cases to set up a network of blogs, or a blog farm to generate page rank, and link authority. Anyone who knows about such things can spot these auto blogs a mile away. Typically there titles link directly to RSS feed content, and headings will focus on keywords that a sblogger is focusing on.
Why are they annoying?
Apart from the fact that someone else is trying to cash in on your hard work, there are also duplicate content issues. Search engines don’t like duplicate content, and if you were unlucky enough to have a low ranking new site, that doesn’t get indexed regularly, there is a good change that search engine spiders could index the content of the Sblog, before indexing it on your site, marking the original as duplicate, you would have to be unlucky, but it’s food for thought.
What can you do to protect your content?
I have a few ideas that may help protect your content.
The first and most obvious is not to syndicate your content. Most autoblogging software steals your content using your RSS feed. This will have a negative affect on your readership, as many readers prefer to follow your content using an RSS reader. However, if you found this problem to be a getting out of hand it is an option, albeit a pretty extreme one.
Have a signature or graphic in your posts, that states where the content came from and paste it at the bottom of each post, not in the template. That way any site using it would be obvious. I use this technique on this blog, the Pingable graphic at the bottom of each article is part of the article content.
What do they look like – how do you spot them?
This Plonker steals my content. And here is another one linked in the same network. It’s pretty obvious that these are rubbish sites stealing content when you start reading them. Both sites are set up to provide link juice and traffic for this service. There are hyperlinks surrounded by key phrases at the top of both blogs. If you dig deeper I am sure you will find that this guy has a huge network of free sites stealing content then passing links to their main site.
Tags: Sblogs
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Comments (32)
Wow. That is some scary stuff. I didn’t realize post theft was so crazy. I’m definitely going to be much more aware of my rss feed and information. Thanks for the tips.
Thanks for the tip on using the graphic at the bottom. I didn’t like the idea of putting “This came from http://www.kantor.com” at the bottom of each post, but a graphic — that makes sense and doesn’t offend my aesthetics.
I prefer to create at least one link at the content that be linked to my other post. So if my contents are scrapped, I have one back link from other site
@ Zack: Thanks for visiting.
@ Andrew: Great that you found the advice useful, Spam, and spam blogs really piss me off.
@ Deca: I like the way you think there, although I suspect a lot of auto blogs apply no-follow to all of the outbound links.
The signature is the method that has worked the best for me!
I have many posts with some affiliate links. What the amazing? I’ve got sales from the sites that have scrapped my content
Thanks for the great information. *stumbles*
Hi. Nice post. Jez
Thanks a lot! I’m also tired of sploggers. It was very helpful. I became your RSS subscriber.
@Deca: That is the same recomendation that google makes. It makes there job of finding the original source easyer and enables them to give credit where it is due.
Great tip with the sig. We are now starting to see content thieves as a growing problem also. Would be great if we could just round them up and shoot them…
Thanks for the good tips, I am having a problem with one of my blogs getting copied 6 ways to Sunday by about three others. Am going to try your suggestion about the sig and see how it goes.
Thanks for the great advice. Will be adding an original signature from now on.
Danny
This is good advice for your avg person but…
There are some strange side benefits to these blogs and times when they are not always ‘spamlogs’. I have actually setup several sites for clients that included some headline posts from related sites to great effect for both.
When use as intended these technologies help all of use distribute and share our data well. Of course on the bad side there are always lazy thieves looking to profit off others efforts.
As a quick side note to benefiting from spammers. They tend to post 100 words or less so good stories get followed to you. They also 80-90% leave link direct back to original story so it helps you getting related link-backs. All dark clouds have silver if scraped well.
Great posting thanks
Peace Darth Guru
this tip don’t work for blogs that use FeedBurner plugin, which redirect all the feeds traffic to feedburner.
Because, only a small part of the post is delivered. So, this signature stuff won’t be included to the feeds.
Like it is used on my blog.
But there is a problem. I have submitted my blog to an aggegrator. The Aggregator’s PR is higher then my blog, so, when google index the aggregator, my post on my blog is buried by the aggregator in the SERP.
Anyone can tell me what i have to do?
I have this problem all the time. Somedays it seems like a conspiracy. Is there a virus on something I can send them?
I have this problem on a few of my blogs. A graphic is a good idea though.
Yes, plagiarism is on the romp these days on the Net. But sure there are way to fight against it.
I don’t get too concerned about splogs. They’re annoying when they show up in SERPS, but I’m ok with them scrapping me. Just be sure to include lots of internal links in your post content, and you get free low quality backlinks. And as long as your site has enough authority, there isn’t much chance of them out ranking you for your own content. It does sucks to get scrapped by an authority site though when you’re new.
You can try only putting excerpts instead of the full text of each post. That may help some.
I like the idea of having link to your site in each article or post. This way even if autoblog picks post up you still have link to post and google should figure out your the origianl content for the article.
Even though splogs scrape your content, they most of the time link back to your original post. The scraped post might even rank better in the SERP for some time. But in the long run you get PR from those backlinks and begin to rank better as the original source. So relax and focus on creating good content that a splogger would want to scrape. That’s my experience
I do not like the sites that pull the top 10 to 30 search results off google or yahoo use the text and do not have any live links to sites. I do not know how you could ever stop those sites google and yahoo would have to remove them from search results.
I think this problem with your stolen content being indexed first from other blogs appear only when you have a new blog. But if you get some backlinks to this article, I think it will rank better in serp then your copies.
I like to have a link and date in any post i make. This way google knows what site is original content so they know the other is duplicate.
I cannot be.ieve google would give page rank for those blogs. It is against thier own terms and adsense terms. I see alot of them around but do not know why google does not take them off search because they are all duplicate content. Nice ideas like adding link and maybe image to site in post.
I have heard of content stealing (and the problem of duplicate content) but not for the reasons you’ve listed (adsense and other ads).
Isn’t RSS being used less now a days anyway? I thought people use social sites like Twitter to inform their followers of new updates.
Cheers,
Bob.
It’s like someone is trying to make money out of your own work, this is pretty annoying most of the time, but good thing there are lots things that we can do to avoid it.
Thanks for the great post on how to protect your content. Your post brought up a lot of interesting points about autoblogs that I haven’t thought about. I’m looking forward to reading a lot more of your site in the future.
Hi Simon! Thanks for the tip on the signature/graphic. It’s so simple and sensible, I’m surprised not many people have thought of this, or are doing this already. It’s like pacing a watermark on your photos so nobody can steal them. Or sewing in a name plate with your name and contact info on your child’s uniforms on the first day of school. Okay, I’m starting to blabber.
Thanks for sharing. Autoblogging software really does steals your RSS and it can cause a negative effect in your search engine rankings. Google doesn’t like black hat techniques in SEO so better do away with automatic softwares.