If you have Google Alerts running for your top keywords to identify when someone has linked to you or mentioned your site, you’ve surely found questionable places abusing your content.
A huge percentage of the time I have found that they are junk blogs at blogspot.com. That’s Google blogging platform. It’s free and spammers abuse the hell out of it and steal keyword rich content with no attribution to authors to get their vi*agra links into the engines.
If you’ve seen this and you haven’t figured out how to get past the abysmally closed door policy of Google (you can’t flag blogs in blogspot at all on the blog pages. Nor can you easily figure out how to report them.)
Here’s how you can fight back against Blogspot Spam:
1. Make a note of the blog URL. It is usually a bunch of garbled numbers and crap. These guys aren’t even trying to hide what they do. Here’s an example: the86295. blogspot. com
2. Report the scum bucket here.
3. Repeat this simple step every time you see a crap.blogspot.com URL using your content to spam.
As smart as Google is, for some reason they’ve chosen to let us be the spam cops in this case. So be it. With everyone reporting these crap blogs the spammers will soon find it not worth the effort and move on to the next wide-open spam spot on the web.
ProBlogger has an article on how to fight scrapers that will help you with a Wordpress plugin and tips on how to ruin a spammer’s day by getting them booted from Adsense for using your content.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks Jack. I’ve noticed that I am a “victim” of this abuse and it’s time to start doing something about it.
Hopefully it will eventually make the web a more ethical form of media.
Jack,
Thanks so much for this information – I’ve been a victim of ths on five different sites and they use the saem article.
I’ve also seen the same abuse on Wordpress.com itself and struggled to report them as well on that system.
If anybody knows how to report abuse on wordpress.com reply to this thread so I can benefit.
Thanks agains Jack,
Cliff
The spamming is bad enough, but I once found an Indonesian blog that was listing my (and several other folks’) ecommerce store urls with instructions on how to hack into the store administration. (There was a security hole in the shopping cart software that we were unaware of.)
I flagged the blog. Google made him take down the offending page, but the blog stayed up–even though he had other pages with credit card numbers and no doubt had tons of that kind of stuff buried all over his blog archives. He was clearly violating the TOS.
Wordpress.com, on the other hand, took down a similar blog within hours.
Cliff, Wordpress has info on its complaint procedures here:
http://wordpress.com/complaints/
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Thanks Virginia I’ll let Wordpress know.
Google has terminated most of the blogs the person had my article posted.
Cliff
CastleCops SIRT Team is on the ball, and claims to have Google’s attention regarding this issue.
It’s prevalent across blogs AND growing numbers of “Google Page Creator” pages.
Abusebutler has a form to submit these splogs
URIBL has a form to submit these splogs
Castlecops.com/SIRT has a form to submit these splogs.
You can also flag/report them as noted above, but I dont know how much Google pays attention to those reports.
All else? spamreport@google.com
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I have a couple of guys from Bermuda who have taken large chunks of my text. I have emailed them and requested they stop, but either they can’t read English or they figure I don’t have any ability to fight them in Bermuda. It’s very frustrating. I try to have unique content, and even if they emailed me for help, I would have written some content FOR them, rather than have my content duplicated. I’ve found BitScan.com and CopyScape.com to be very helpful.
Google Alert as you mentioned is also very useful.
The URL to report Blogspot spam blogs is:
http://help.blogger.com/?page=troubleshooter.cs&problem=&ItemType=spam&contact_type=Spam&Submit=Continue
Hope this helps!
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