Content Plagiarizers
One interesting wordpress plugin is the default Akismet plugin, which checks your comments you received for your posts daily against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. When confirm, akismet plugin will show the number of spams and show on your blog if you activate this useful tool. Judging from the number of spam I have since I started (656 to date), it would seem that I maybe quite “popular”. Most of them are really spam, however, I was caught unaware with two of the recent comments. They were actually trapped by Akismet, but when I peruse the list, I thought that they should be genuine comments, in fact they have plagiarized my blog and stole it as one of their posts!
Content plagiarizers or blog scrapers as Chris Garrett coined them, are becoming somewhat nuisance and annoying. Chris even called them scrapers scum, to quote what he says:
A popular gripe of bloggers is the scraper scum. You know, the people who copy your content then slap ads around it or use it as search engine fodder so they can pimp their spam. It might be apparent that these gits annoy me too.
Chris’ recommendation is to install this plugin WP_RssSticky which works by adding copyright and download links into your RSS feeds and posts. To quote what Chris says:
Why is this important? Well now when scrapers steal your content at least they will be linking back to you. The more they promote their copied and pasted spam, the more weight those backlinks will provide you. I’m hoping also it might hint to Google and co that your post is the original.
Maybe it is a blessing in disguise, I have two weighted back links to my blog!
