Blogs Scraping Content - What to Do

[KevinG]

Something came up yesterday that I thought would make a valuable post for some people.

This is for anyone that runs blogs, and it also applies for any site that may have it's original text content copied.

It's no secret to many of us that the online business attracts a large crowd of people looking for easy riches with little to no work involved.

One of the things I've seen this past year is blogs set up that pull content from other blogs RSS Feeds.

I have seen my original posts copied onto other blogs.

Brief Background:
The blog I run is in the adult humor, celebrities and babes area.

However, I also have a substantial site in the cigar lifestyle market. It is NOT a blog, but there are a ton of cigar bloggers that know my site.

The legit, hard-working bloggers, unbeknownst to me until yesterday, seem to have thought it worthy to add me to their list of "buddies". (Flattering, I must say.)

Yesterday, I received a group email from the best, most professional cigar bloggers listing a bunch of other blogs that have been stealing their content.

One of them offered the solution of submitting a DCMA take down notice to the offending sites host companies.

Here is what I told the group:

It seems these sites that you guys mentioned have set up blogs that have a bot to scrape content from RSS Feeds because they are too lazy and dumb to actually produce real work. Of the four sites mentioned in all the emails I received, there is only one that I would be concerned with. The rest are not worth the effort.

- http://www.loversoftheleaf.com/ - this site is monetized with Google Ad Sense. IF he is scraping YOUR content, YOU should report them to Google. Each one of you should do this. He is making money off your content. (I did not find any of my content there.)

The url for Google Spam reports is:
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html.

In this case though, it might be better to use the specific mechanism for reporting Google Ad Sense Violations.

You just click the Ads by Google link on the offending site. Explained in detail here:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014665.html

As to the rest:

1. http://www.cigarsmoker.net - seems to have stopped posting around Dec 4. No monetization seen on his site. Probably a waste of time to worry about.
2. http://clubhousecigars.com/ - No monetization seen on his site. Probably a waste of time to worry about.
3. http://7cigars.com/ - definitely scraping content, but they are linking back to the original posts, so this can actually help your sites. If you allow pingbacks and their posts become a comments on your blog, just delete them. If you use Akismet Spam plugin for Wordpress it should catch any of that.

If any of you guys want to exchange links, let me know.

Happy smoking and blogging!
Kevin