I have been dealing for the last few days with a website that is importing Focus Organic's feed onto their website. This means they are stealing my posts in entirety, including images. It also means the copyright tag at the bottom of each post in the feed is being imported, which is ironic. This website appears to be doing the same with other site's feeds, as well, to use the content of other people to populate their AdSense ads. Every other post on this site is from another site.
I am not going to post the link because I do not want to give them traffic, but the name of the site is motorcycleinsurance4u (if you are seeing this post on motorcycleinsurance4u, keep in mind that the owner of this site has likely not written any of the posts on it, and definitely none labeled Focus Organic.com). Why is the content from Focus Organic, a green website, being stolen for that site? I'm guessing it has to do with the reclaimed wood motorcycle posted on Twelve Green Gift Ideas from Gaiam. I think this site searched for other blog feeds that included the word "motorcycle," and added these feeds to be imported to their site to profit off of other peoples hard work.
What have I done so far about this? The site has no contact form or email address to contact the webmaster, which is not surprising, since it is nothing but a splog (spam blog). I commented numerous times on my own articles posted on their site telling them who I am, and asking them to remove my content because they do not have my permission. I told them that if they do not remove my content, I will have to take legal action. I reported the blog to its host, and I am right now in the process of putting together a written report of copyright infringement to fax to the host. I have also reported the blog to Google AdSense for copyright infringement.
Am I going overboard? I don't think so. They have no right to use the content I put my hard work into, and definitely no right to profit from it. Duplicate content issues come into play here, also; I don't want Focus Organic to be penalized for duplicate content just because a splog stole the posts here.
If I get no response from the host after I fax the report over, I may not be posting tomorrow, and I apologize ahead of time. I don't want the website to scrape anymore content from here. I am posting this so that any viewers of that website will see that the site is full of nothing but content theft, because, since it is set up to automatically pull from my feed, this post will show up over there, with the site's name in it.
Anyone have any other suggestions for what I can do about this theft?
July 16th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Well, I have several suggestions but it is too much to go through right here.
The main thing though is to learn how to use the DMCA. It is the lever you're going to have to use to get hosts to remove infringing content. It'll help with this case and any further ones that you have. You'll also have to file a DMCA notice with Adsense and the search engines if you opt to go that route.
I have stock letters on my site if you want as well as tips for finding the host and the DMCA agent.
Also, if you need any help with the case or just want a second opinion, email me with the links and I'll gladly take a quick look at it.
The whole process should not be a headache, no reason to not post tomorrow
Let me help you and we should be able to knock it out in no time.
Just tell me how I can help!
July 16th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Jonathan, thank you for your concern! The DCMA notice is actually what I just faxed over to Blogger (I said "report of copyright infringement" in the post, I didn't know the real name until you mentioned it).
I will definitely keep you in mind if I need any help. Hopefully, Blogger will receive my fax in the morning and this hassle will soon be over... Do you know how long it takes for these things to be taken care of after the DCMA notice is received?
July 16th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Google and Blogger is one of the longest. If you faxed it, fully expect it to take the better part of two weeks. Some see results in a few days, but most take over a week.
I do know a cheat that will let you email in your DMCA notice to Google. If you have a scanned signature and the ability to create PDFs, you can make a digital version of your DMCA notice and email it to amac at google dot com and it is usually resolved a little bit faster.
Still, be prepared to be patient on this one. If I can do anything to help though, let me know!
July 16th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Good luck with fighting them, but another 2 splogs (spam blogs) will pop up in it's place..... but, use it to your advantage..... link to your other posts in your articles, and then you'll get free links from them to your site, in order to help you out in the search engines.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Yeah, I'm with the 4th commenter. At first when splogs started stealing my feeds I kindly asked them to stop or went down the long road of getting google or their host to take them off line but eventually I just put a link back to my site at the bottom of my feed (with a link to my feed too) and figure it's just another way of getting my content syndicated.
For the truly nefarious looking splogs I do still try to get my content removed but otherwise I figure my time is better spent using the spam to my advantage and focusing my time on writing better posts.
It just seems to be a slippery slope eventually detering into never-ending battles with the sploggers.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:21 am
There is a real danger to trying to use spam to your advantage and it works like this.
1) Most spam blogs strip out links within the RSS feed. They don't want to spend their outbound PR on anything that they don't operate so they only link to other spam content.
2) Google routinely blacklists and bans spam blogs from their index, humans rarely visit these sites and almost never click links on them.
3) Google and other search engines, once determining a blog is spam, check the sites they link to and either reduce or ban those sites, especially those without much of a rating. This site, for example, still has a PR 0 in Google on the domain. It would be very vulnerable to both being replaced in Google by a spam blog, since some of them do carry more trust, and being banned, since this site doesn't have enough trust to be a clear ham blog.
Once a site is more established, this technique can work a little better but is still risky in some cases. This is a strategy that works well in conjunction with a content theft detection and cessation strategy, but is a gamble as as standalone.
If you want to go that route, I can recommend some great plugins but I would still stay on top of it, at least until you have enough PR to guarantee you are not a spam blog.
July 17th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Organic Baby Food and Adam, I know more will pop up, but I want to deal with this one because they are importing my FULL posts. I have seen others importing my content, but they are small excerpts, no more than 2 or 3 sentences. These still make me angry, but not angry enough to go through all the trouble of what I am going through with this one. They also haven't used every single one of my posts (the site mentioned in this post started importing on the 8th, and have copied every post since then).
Jonathan, that is exactly why I want to do something about this site. Focus Organic is too new to really hold any weight, and while it seems the splog currently has no PR, I don't know how long it has been around. I'd rather not risk being penalized... The site does keep all my posts intact, including the copyright information at the bottom of the posts in the feed, but that is besides the point. I don't particularly want free links from a splog scraping my content.
I did decide to go ahead and post today, anyway, in hopes that this will be taken care of soon. I don't want to shut down my site because of some loser
July 17th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I think you have the exact right idea. I tell people that you have to pick your battles, but you need to win the ones you pick..
Definitely keep me posted!
July 18th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Thanks for your suggestion. Definitely good advice for new blogs.
In fact, Adsense is the only advertisement on my blog and I was wondering if I should take it down
July 18th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I had this happen to me with two different websites. What I did was look up the owner of the domain name at http://www.whois.net/ since neither of the sites offered any contact information. I sent emails to the email addresses listed. I got one response that they were going to remove all my content and stop using my feed in this way. I have yet to hear back from the other, but since I have their phone numbers, a call is in order if I don't hear from them by the end of the day.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Jennae, I would have looked up the owner, but they were hosted on Blogger, so there was no information available on them!
Thought you all might like to know that, after sending Blogger the DCMA notice, they have taken care of the site. It got deleted! Won this battle, preparing for the next... Glad my mom raised me to never give up
July 20th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Hi Stefanie,
Sorry to hear that you are having problems with scraping and content theft.
There are different things, from the web security perspective, that you can do to protect your site/content.
You can use blacklisting (blocking only selected bots, but allowing the rest) or whitelisting (blocking all, but selected bots) strategies. The former one is faster and easier to implement than the latter one. For whitelisting, you will need a good understanding of server technology, user-agents, etc, etc.
I put together 3 long posts that will walk you through the process. Read them in this order and implement the changes once you clearly understand what you are doing.
1. Practical Solutions for Blocking Spam, Bots and Scrapers. Don't rush to implement the .htaccess changes. Read the next post first.
2. How to Identify User Agents and IP Addresses for Blocking Bots and Crawlers
3. LogZ Free Log Analyzer for User-Agent and IP Detection
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I would be happy to help.
And if you know other people running into the same problems, let them know that there are practical solutions available to help them.
Wish you the best.
Augusto
July 21st, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Thank you for those links, Spanish SEO, I will check them out.
I noticed today that the site itself was not deleted, just my content from it. I will have to watch to make sure none of my content continues to be posted to the site, and I hope that the others who are having their content stolen will contact Blogger and take the steps to close this splog down.
July 21st, 2008 at 6:49 pm
If you got one rogue doing that, then most likely there are others following the same pattern.
Check GYM (Google, Yahoo & MSN)to make sure no one else has stolen your content. Use a unique paragraph and wrap it within quotations, so that the Search Engine query an exact match for that specific paragraph.
There is also a RSS Footer plugin that will add a copyright notice and a link back to your site or post in all your feeds.
Use Google Alert for your domain, keywords and important pieces of information you'd like to protect so that in case someone copies them you can find that out in a timely manner.
Sarah Bird, esq from SEOMoz.org wrote useful articles on effective ways to take action in those cases.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Spanish, I actually do use the RSS Footer plugin, which made it really obvious the content was mine!
Google Alert is a good idea, I could set up an alert "Focus Organic" which would show me any site importing my full feed.
July 26th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Congrats on the victory! I'm with you on battling with the splogs who rip my entire content, but if they only use an excerpt I usually ignore it since it's semi-fair use and since I disagree with the Associated Press's recent banning of use of excerpts I'd be a hypocrite to attack every splog that quotes me partially. The ones that rip my content in full though get sent e-mails and have their hosts contacted if that fails.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Adam, I agree. I've seen some others using excerpts and didn't say a thing. It helped that they weren't excerpting every single post, though.