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A few things I have noticed about copyright theft:

  1. pkayski
    Member

    I will try to keep this short:

    1. I post a blog post and I usually get a pingback in a short period of time, indicating that I got splogged.
    2. I have not received a pingback indicating I have been splogged on any older blogs, always ones that I post the most recently.
    3. I had 7 visitors (HAHA I suck) today before I wrote this blog post in question. Now I posted the blog post, I wait a bit and I get the pingback. I check the blog stats... still have 7 VISITORS! How is this explained? Is my blog in some sort of registry where I automatically get splogged everytime I write a blog post? Like I send a ping to all the scrappers out there to take my content automatically
    4. I have noticed that if I do not get a pingback within a hour or two that means my blog is "safe" and I will not get splogged (well no pingback indicating I will get splogged)

    Are these patterns consistent with what some of you guys experience? Have you ever had content stolen where you did not know about it via pingback but found out via other means (copyscrape or google search for example)... Do these scrappers always give you this link in order to indicate to you that they have stolen content?

    Would like to hear from anyone and your experiences about this :)
    Cheers!

  2. raincoaster
    Member

    Yes, sploggers generally subscribe to your RSS feed or the RSS feed for a tag or category, meaning when you post is when they steal, or not at all. It's been estimated that nearly 20% of RSS subscribers are actually just robotic scrapers.

  3. pkayski
    Member

    Ah that explains the amount of viewers staying constant (as RSS views don't count right?)....

    Hmmmm and there is no way to control who can subscribe to your RSS feed is there?

    Furthermore if my blog is available everyone to see, anyone can subscribe correct?

    Would having a partial feed reduce the amount of scrapping /splogging??

    Sorry about all the questions, I can't seem to be able to see these questions in the FAQ.

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    Anyone can subscribe. Having a partial feed will reduce the number of effective scrapers, but most robot scrapers will use even sentence fragments, so I'd say no meaningful reduction. It WILL piss off real readers, though.

    Scrapers give you pingbacks as a sort of bribe, so you'll see they linked to you and think "well, I'll take the Technorati juice and leave it for now" instead of reporting them.

  5. pkayski
    Member

    Ah ok, I shall leave the feeds as they are then :D. It is grateful to know though each time I get scrapped though, they do a pingback so I can at least know, instead of having to search for scrappers that have stolen my blog posts.

    So to re-cap/confirm what you said: Most if not all sploggers/scrappers will give you a pingback right?

  6. raincoaster
    Member

    Not at all. I have no idea what percentage give a pingback. I just know that some do. The ones who don't, well, I have no way of knowing. If your blog doesn't have much pagerank, you could do a Google search for whole sentences from your posts and see if anything comes up, but otherwise there's no way of knowing as far as I'm aware.

  7. pkayski
    Member

    Ahhh ok, thanks for clearing all of that up raincoaster :D.... You are an absolute legend!!!

    Have a great day/night :)
    Cheers!

  8. raincoaster
    Member

    Thanks, you too. Stay gold.

  9. balnu147
    Member

    I got fed up of trying to threaten sites from sploging stuff from my blog.. I let them do as long as they don't have ads..

  10. dadshouse
    Member

    If they have ads, how do you stop them?

  11. feartheseeds
    Member

    What you can do is insert a link to your About Page, maybe in an image,... if your entire post is scraped, like mine have been, there's the possibility of a trackback to your site. You can also put a copyright image at the top of your posts explaining how much like parasites sploggers are, or leave a copyright notice in a piece of text at the top of your post in the colour of your theme so the text isn't visible to your readers, but gets picked up by the splog.

    Or write posts occasionally explaining what sploggers and scrapers are so bloggers who read your stuff can understand what's happening to their work. It's always better to do something than nothing when it comes to protecting your intellectual property.

    Try this... http://exposingsploggers.wordpress.com/

  12. encouragetheyoungwomen
    Member

    I appreciate this conversation as I've been puzzling over this too; just haven't figured out yet whether or not I should let it worry me.

    I have a question based on what what fearthseeds said. In most of my posts, I usually link back to at least one earlier post. This would be helpful for folks finding me as the real author?

  13. dlager
    Member

    @ balnu147 I really agree with your attitude, most be people realize what a splog is when they come across them as readers.

    I do report them to their web hosts, most of the time they will send an E-mail thank you and delete the blog.
    The webhosts that dont take action, well i dont let it get under my skin anymore.

  14. broncomadness
    Member

    hmmm... interesting

  15. thebeadden
    Member

    I've been getting a lot of my stuff taken as well.

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