My spam filter picked up a pingback for one of my posts last night. The post had been up for less than an hour when I saw it and considering the fact that I’ve only been posting on this blog for just over a week and my traffic is pretty still minimal (alright, so far it’s pretty much just me and a couple of people from my office plus a couple of referrals from those nice folks at MetaToast) you can imagine my surprise at being ping’d that quickly. Curious about the source of this pingback, I clicked the link to check out the site it was coming from. Staring back at me from a blog using the same theme as Matt Cutts were the words I’d typed less than an hour ago. “Blog scraping wankers!” I thought to myself. Looking through the rest of the posts on there, they all seem to be scraped from various SEO blogs, bookended by repetitive, automated boilerplate about “digging around for some info on…” and asking for comments. This is just so bastarding lazy. Still, I figured there wasn’t alot I could do about it by myself and left it at that. And besides, at least it was a backlink, even if it was just from some crappy PR0 splog.
Then today I saw a story on Sphinn that lead me to Ask-Kalena’s post about her problem with “Evil Site Scraping Bastards” doing exactly the same thing to her blog. Of course, with her readership and level of respect in the SEO community, her call to action for a Googlebombing of the “bastards” in question brought some very swift results and even a public apology from the culprit.
Now, I know that a blog this new on a brand new domain name isn’t going to have alot of link weight to throw around, but it got me wondering whether it might be worth trying to get a “Blog Scraping Wankers” bomb of my own going on. Perhaps if I suck up enough to the folks on Sphinn and Twitter they’ll help me out. And if not, it’ll at least be interesting to see if they scrape this post as well.
But mostly I’m hoping that the Sphinners will help me out (Pretty please? With sugar on top?). Maybe even form a “Blog Scraping Revenge Squad” to help other bloggers when it happens to them.
Learning By Doing
SEOpsCentre
March 19th, 2008 at 2:34 am
Blog Scraping Revenge Squad
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Easy-peasy RSS Squeezy!
Hey Ken, try to always include (in your post) a link back to itself. That way if you get scraped the wankers will at least be giving you a link, Google will probably see that you are the original, and it will show as a pingback in your blog so you will be alerted to it, and you can decide what action if any to take.
I’m having deja vous here. Did I already write this same thing on your blog?
Anyway, even if I did, it still works.
David, I’ve been trying to make sure to put a link back to one of my other posts each time I put something new up here. That’s how I got the pingback that spotted this scraper.
Not sure if I saw it mentioned on one of your posts over a MetaToast or if it was somewhere else, but it’s definitely good practice to self link for exactly this purpose.
(copy paste from Sphinn comment)
Im afraid that what resolves came about with Kalenas miracle spanking of the her thief in question was a fluke. She got lucky. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what can be done in your case.
Well, I haven’t had anymore pingbacks as a result of the self-referencing links in anymore of my posts, so I guess they’ve either noticed that they’ve been busted and stopped copying me, or decided that my content’s not worth nicking anymore. I knew I didn’t have the link-weight to be able to pressure them the way Kalena could (and it was lucky for her that it turned out to be the office junior playing with things his bosses didn’t like) but I think it just helped to vent some of the frustration.