Need help? Check out our Support site, then


WordPress.com Forums » Support

12

Content and Feed Theft of my WordPress Blog by a WordPress Blog

  1. cohn
    Member

    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.

    http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=earthquake+rocks+google&btnG=Search+Blogs

    http://cinderella.de/whelp/news/?p=666

    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.

  2. ellaella
    Member

    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.

  3. cohn
    Member

    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?

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    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.

  5. ellaella
    Member

    I 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.

  6. cohn
    Member

    OK. 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.

    http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS270&q=earthquake+rocks+google+too&btnG=Google+Search

    Would you not agree?

    Theft of content is one thing. Theft of its authorship is another.

  7. cohn
    Member

    In 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 http://cinderella.de/whelp/news/
    The contents of my post will be from this thread along with screen shots.

    Here it goes!

  8. princo
    Member

    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:
    http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/spyshredderscanner.com

  9. raincoaster
    Member

    Sploggers subscribe to tag feeds, typically. What do you mean by "compromised?" Your feed is going out as usual; it has not been hacked. It's just that someone is taking it and doing something illegal with it.

  10. princo
    Member

    To make it clear: i think the website cinderella.de is beeing hacked.

  11. dissfunktional
    Member

    That 'banner' in the top right ran something when I went to the site. Yes, something is going on and I'm not going back; I'm actually going to clean my computer after I make this comment.

    I made a quick screenshot while I was there so you can see it and not go to the cinderella site:

    http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2220/2424331788_f07056c295_o.jpg

  12. princo
    Member

    I sent the complaints to the owner and the hoster. Tomorrow i make a phone call to the owner.
    Be sure, afterwards this splog wouldn't exist anymore.

  13. cohn
    Member

    Raincoaster compromised ie., their site:
    1.) Took my content
    2). Put it on its site
    3). Fed it as its own to both search and blog results
    4). Distributed my content as its own both through search and blog results before it was recognized as mine.
    5). By its method, denied my site's ability to then have it distributed.

    This transpired over a three and a half hour period and has since been resolved by WordPress, the WordPress Community and Google.

    Thanks!

    Tim Cohn

    I have posted some screen shots here:
    http://cohn.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/stop-blog-content-theft-splagiarism/

  14. raincoaster
    Member

    I'm not going to argue with you about the definition of the word "Compromised."

  15. cohn
    Member

    It may not have been the right word but it got the job done.

    What term might you have suggested?

  16. raincoaster
    Member

    "Copied." The word compromised indicates some kind of hack, whereas this was more or less a straightforward copy/paste.

  17. riraito
    Member

    guys,what's there to argue about anyway?

    the bottom-line is his blog contents got stolen by another blogger isnt it?

    does compromised and copied even matter? god...

  18. pkayski
    Member

    Cohn (and anyone else in a similar situation):

    I would like to suggest (and this is my suggestion so you don't have to take it) in that instead of contacting the owner of the blog, I recomend you just contacting the host/domain providers/IP/etc and asking them to shut the site down for the content they have stolen from you. I see it as fastforwarding on the innevitable outcome (i.e. they will ignore you, so you have to talk to the providers of the domain/ip/host anyway)

    Hope you get the mofo's shut down.
    Cheers!

  19. raincoaster
    Member

    A hacked feed needs staff intervention: a copied feed needs blogger action. That's why it matters.

  20. jlosh
    Member

    There is an option in the dashboard regarding adding your site to search engines
    (http://yoursite.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-privacy.php)
    -- But this might not help you out regarding someone snatching your feeds.

  21. thesacredpath
    Member

    One option is to go to settings > reading and set the number of posts to show in your feed to a low number, say 2. The also set it so that your feed is summary and not full. This will mean that all they will get is a partial sentence or two instead of the entire post.

  22. oceallaigh
    Member

    I typically put a copyright notice at the end of every post. Maybe I should put it at the beginning ...

  23. raincoaster
    Member

    It can't hurt. But ironically, they often scrape that, too.

  24. oceallaigh
    Member

    Raincoaster:

    they often scrape that, too.

    Bad pub for them. Good pub for me. Assuming the content is any good, that is ...

  25. raincoaster
    Member

    They don't care about publicity. They don't even care if anyone reads the posts they steal. They literally ONLY want the hit. Defrost Indoors had a post stolen complete with hotlinked picture. She took the picture down and replaced it with a picture of a dunce picking his nose with the words "This post was stolen from the great blog http://bridlepath.wordpress.com" and it still took them like a week to notice and take it down.

  26. princo
    Member

    I now got a mail from the owner of "cinderella.de". His site was compromised by a hacker. He now has deleted the splog, and will take further actions in securing his website.

  27. dissfunktional
    Member

    the owner of the site also left a thank you comment on cohn's blog for bringing it to his attention, and updating him on the issue. very nice.

    http://cohn.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/hot-news-blog-content-theft-httpcinderelladewhelpnews/#comments

  28. cohn
    Member

    His non hosted WordPress blog was hacked and his feed fed the copied content from my blog to Google's blog and search results... until when? Until he was alerted and "unhacked" his blog? How? By whom? I can't imagine the average blog owner would have that quick a turnaround time.

    Who's action caused his feed with my content to be deleted from search results? His? WordPress'?
    Google?

    Why did a blog search for Earthquake Rocks Google Too still show his blog instead of mine up until several hours ago?

    On my blog, I have screen shots of his blog results in Google blog and search results published first with my content - not mine.

    Also, I didn't contact him. Princo said he was going to contact him the next day but all of the aforementioned changes occurred within several hours. All I did was write the post...

  29. raincoaster
    Member

    That is awesome. You should be proud of yourself.

  30. pkayski
    Member

    Haha gotta love it! If only all sploggers crashed that easily!

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.

About this Topic

Tags