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.
15 Responses to “Protecting Your Content from Sblogs and Autoblogs”
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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