Heads up on a site scraping right off WordPress
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Recently, I’d added a bit of text to my posts that reads as following:
[Note: If you are reading this post at a site other than the original Fracas blog, you are reading material obtained without consent (yep… stolen ) and the owner of that blog is a thief. ]
Obviously, the name Fracas links to my blog so that when posts are scraped, any reader at that blog will know it was a stolen post.
It didn’t take long for this to happen. What I noticed though, is that this site is scraping in full, every WordPress.com post having been tagged with the tag ‘women’ or ‘woman’.
I thought I would give this heads up to everyone that uses WordPress.com and the WP guru folks. I’m sure this will tick you right off.
The site address showing my stolen post (along with the thief moniker… that really does give me a laugh to see it there).
…and
The main page of the site to compare with the WP page for the tag ‘women’ and the WP page for the tag ‘woman’.
Lastly, on their links list, their link for ‘woman’ mag takes you to a page dedicated to the sales of drugs like Viagra and Cialis… the whole point of the blog, trying to draw traffic off of all the WordPress.com bloggers tagging with those two tags and then hoping some of that traffic will click over to the pill page.
The WP folks should be annoyed over their stealing WP content that blatantly, and this is a heads up to everyone who plans to use the tag woman or women in the near future. Your post will be stolen!
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I haven’t quite worked out how yet, but I think that with CSS you could make that text “hidden” on your site, but make it appear on the scraping site, so YOUR viewers don’t see it, but the viewers of the other site will. Any CSS-experts in the house?
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I think I’ve also seen that somewhere… I’ve got 50-some drafts where I stockpile good stuff when I find it. I probably have it in there somewhere but was pressed for time when I’d written that post.
I wanted to give others a heads up since not everyone is able to add something like that to their CSS. I thought the WP folks should know about this scummy site too.
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Regarding the above information, I found this in my stockpile of goodies. Hope it’s helpful to others. If I shouldn’t have posted this link here, I apologize and I’m ok with it being removed.
Now to go do it for myself too. ;-)
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I managed to do it.Thanks to
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/06/12/using-css-to-thwart-content-theft/My original post:
http://tpvswp.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/why-no-adsense-on-wordpresscom-is-a-good-thing/My “scraper” post:
http://wpvstp.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/why-no-adsense-on-wordpresscom-is-a-good-thing/Now I have to go an do this for all my posts…
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Thanks justjennifer… I’ve actually been there before. The reason I posted here is because it’s not just one blogger’s posts being stolen, it’s all WordPress.com posts tagged with women or woman. I thought since it was a broad theft that would undoubtedly cause many complaints to the WP folks, I’d give the heads up and bloggers here could know it’s already been outed.
wpvstp – your link refers to the same fellow I linked to. I guess he’s the guru for this. ;-)
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