Content and Feed Theft of my WordPress Blog by a WordPress Blog
I wrote a post about Google Trends and the earthquake today in Illinois.
For some reason when I made my post, it took a while to get pulled into blog.search at Google. When it did however, it was under someone elses blog who had in turn stolen all of my headlines and content verbatim.
This just occurred today but it looks the blog is grabbing a bunch of feeds.
It hasn’t been unusual for me to see my content scraped and put on splogs but having them usurp my feed and place in blog search for it is an entirely different matter.
Posted: Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
7 Responses to “Content and Feed Theft of my WordPress Blog by a WordPress Blog”
-
ellaella Member April 18th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I feel your pain, but that’s a self-hosted blog and there is nothing wordpress.com can do about it. There are many, many forum threads about scrapers, splogs and DMCA and one or more of them might be of help.
-
cohn Member April 18th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I understand it is self hosted and that content theft is inevitable.
My concern is that it has somehow supplanted my feed into blog.search results – I mean they stole my content and got into blog search before the ink had dried on my post.
My question is about the status of wordpress feed. Has it not been compromised?
If I write a blog post about this topic, will it too be “authored”, scraped and indexed as someone other than its original author?
Should I try it out?
-
raincoaster Member April 18th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
No, the feed has not been “Compromised.” This is standard splogger behaviour: they subscribe to feeds, which go out instantly. And they’re automated, so their posts go up instantly. This is how it works.
-
ellaella Member April 18th, 2008 at 10:08 pmI might well be missing something — it’s been a long day — but your feed is available to anyone with a feed reader and theirs is available to the search engines. As for the swiftness, the other day I posted something on a political blog ( a .com blog not linked to my name here) and in the time it took to check the front page and make sure all was right I had three splogger pingbacks in my spam queue.
Sure, try it, why not? 🙂 I’ve done more devilish things to people who stole my entire content — including my copyright notices.
-
cohn Member April 18th, 2008 at 10:23 pmOK. Thank you both.It too has been a long day over here, I just learned I had another site receive an SQL Injection hack which has created a much longer list of problems to deal with.
As a result, I may not have communicated my thoughts as clearly as I had planned.
Raincoaster, I understand your explanation and I think it makes the most sense.
However, if the splog site has grabbed my content and is now being placed in Google blog results and now Google’s search results, I would argue my feed has been compromised because I am no longer being credited as the post’s author.
-
Would you not agree?
Theft of content is one thing. Theft of its authorship is another.
-
cohn Member April 18th, 2008 at 10:29 pmIn order to eliminate the feed as the source, I will write this post to see if the splog is grabbing my feed specifically or if it is grabbing keyword specific posts.
Only at that point, will it become clear what further options I may have.
My blog entry title will be: Hot news! Blog Content Theft
The contents of my post will be from this thread along with screen shots.Here it goes!
-
princo Member April 18th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Seems for me, that the account of the website was hacked. I’ll send a complaint to the hoster, and contact the owner of the site tomorrow.In the upper right corner of the “blog”, there is an “ad”-banner, linking to a website with VERY bad behaviour.
You can find a report about the “bad” site here:
Site Advisor - This issue has been resolved within three hours by both WordPress, The Community and Google! Thanks! More details to follow.
Search Marketing Communications 
You must be logged in to post a comment.