Blog Thievery Part Two
By Scott, August 13th, 2009 in
Design Articles |
8 Super Comments
The good people at “Programming Blog” are spreading the word about my post yesterday on blog theft: 
That’s a joke, as I hope is obvious. The entire blog theft post was stolen and republished at neurosoftware.ro/programming-blog, without permission or attribution. I’m looking forward to seeing this new one on their site as well.
Meanwhile there have been some changes to report overnight regarding the Sydney Australia blog scraper site affiliated with Shift Interactive. Apparently my post was noticed, because all URLs on the webdesignsydneyaustralia.com domain have been redirected to shiftinteractive.net. So for now at least my 53 consecutive stolen Spoonfed Design posts are off that site, and hopefully will remain so. They are still indexed in Google with scraper URLs, but eventually these will drop out and my duplicate content problems from that particular site will be resolved. Gee, thanks, Shift Interactive!
Interestingly, a number of other domains hosted on the same dizinc server are also now redirecting to shiftinteractive.net, although the Google cache shows these sites were up and running within the past week. On socialmediaaustralia.com, for example, we can no longer see the numerous fanboy.com posts that were there last week. Likewise, the site seotipstricks.com no longer shows the material from the Stepforth marketing blog it had published there recently. In both cases with the author’s permission, I’m sure.
I enjoyed looking at web2.0newsroom.com (that’s web 2.0 newsroom, get it?) because up until a day or two ago it displayed the same Wordpress theme as the site that was robbing Spoonfed Design: 
Apart from the visual appeal there was some great content here too–great because it came from a great blog, profy.com. But now it’s all gone, it all redirects to Shift Interactive.
Now I don’t know too much about this, but is it really good for SEO to have dozens of smammy-sounding domains on the same DNS all redirecting to your main business site? Well I guess these guys are the experts.
Thanks for the great supportive comments on yesterday’s post!
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August 13th, 2009
tom should voice his opinion on the scrapers using his incredible theme, Mandigo. Maybe it’s time to code a remote self destruct button into it!
How do you feel about syndicate blogs? Like CSSGlobe for example. I’ve been pondering the idea of managing one (while writing a few articles for it too).
August 13th, 2009
There’s a world of difference between a fine site like CSSGlobe and the kind of thing I’ve been describing here. CSSGlobe contains a mix of original articles and blurbs submitted by users with direct backlinks to their own sites. User-submitted “community news” has become a common feature on many sites–including this one. I often submit new SFD material to community news on other sites as well.
I’m not sure though what the pros and cons are from a search perspective. I think most design bloggers are not too concerned about SEO when it comes to individual posts. But if you want to show up in Google on searches for “CSS tutorials” or something, you might want to include those words in your page title and URL slug. Some syndicate sites create a unique, indexable page for your community news submission, which will include the same title & slug as your original post. Abduzeedo for example does this. The only content there is the excerpt and link back to your site, but you still end up with multiple Google hits on different sites for your post on “50 awesome CSS tutorials”, so a lot of extra competition. The same thing of course occurs with Diggs or various other social bookmarks.
On the other hand you have the backlink to your site, which helps your ranking. And of course you may receive some direct traffic from the other site, which is the main reason people submit their material in the first place. I’d be interested if anyone knows of any analysis that has been done about SEO consequences of all this.
August 14th, 2009
Thanks for mentioning great content from Profy, appreciate it
I myself have long stopped worrying about who steals my content and where because as soon as I managed to have one splog stop using my content, another two appeared on the same spot – so it did not make sense that much. Yet it is good when at least something is done to fight them – though I have a feeling that there will always be people who will want to make money off what others invest their time, knowledge and efforts in.
August 14th, 2009
I’m aghast at the blatant shamelessness these sites use in ripping off Spoonfed and others. I love the nature of blogging because you can go to numerous hubs that *correctly cite and link* to original content from elsewhere because of the exposure factor, but the obvious stealing is just absurd. Plus I don’t see how they could gain any more from not crediting where the content came from correctly. Its bottomfeeding. Pure and simple.
August 24th, 2009
Interesting stuff, I’ve been following these posts and people seriously amaze me. That shift interactive definitely sounds sketchy.
I also wanted to let you know that when I load this site a login box pops up about six times for “http://beta.vaeou.com”.
September 3rd, 2009
Hey good stuff…keep up the good work!
November 6th, 2009
I love the nature of blogging because you can go to numerous hubs that *correctly cite and link* to original content from elsewhere because of the exposure factor, but the obvious stealing is just absurd!
Sveta Privet!
December 6th, 2009
Thanks. It`s good