How to Steal a Design Blog

Post authorBy Scott, August 12th, 2009 in Design Articles, Web Design | 20 Super Comments

Here’s a post I wish I didn’t have to write, but it’s a cautionary tale for anyone out there still going to the trouble of producing original content. In the design realm lately it seems that there are as many “bloggers” ripping off other people’s content as writing their own. And I don’t mean in the legitimate way of publishing excerpts and links to good stories from other sites with proper acknowledgment. I mean outright thievery.

The last 53 posts on Spoonfed Design have been copied in their entirety, without permission or attribution, on the site webdesignsydneyaustralia.com. This is an example of blog scraping at it’s worst. All of SFD’s  original content published since February 12, 2009 has simply been lifted and republished on this site without so much as a thank you. The past 39 consecutive posts on the Sydney site, without exception, are posts from Spoonfed Design.

The offending site is part of a blog farm designed to funnel traffic to a Sydney-based design and SEO firm called Shift Interactive.  How do I know that? Well, Shift Interactive is owned by a gentleman named Jamie Harbison, who also turns up on a WhoIs search as the admin contact for the scraper site. When I sent a polite note to Jamie asking for removal of my material from his site, twice, I received no reply. But one thing did change: the scraper site URL stated above now redirects to shiftinteractive.net.   That has only made things worse from my perspective, as I’ll go on to explain. But first, here’s a look at the scraper site homepage as of a few days ago, from the Google cache:

Let me be clear, this is not a link blog posting titles and summaries of content with links to the original source. Click on any of those links and you are taken to the complete post with the original SFD title, author and page slug, but at the Sydney domain.   Internal links direct viewers to the previous and next post, also both from SFD of course.

The scraper homepage did previously include one single link to Spoonfed as a “contributor”  down at the bottom of the sidebar.  Good enough to justify swiping all my content? No! Because all of the actual content, all 53 individual posts, appear WITHOUT the sidebar and with no attribution or link of any sort.  And none of those pages have been removed or redirected.  With the homepage now gone the one tenuous line of credit to SFD no longer exists.  But all of the content at the Sydney web design URL still remains. 

The two header links I have circled in red are interesting. The anchor text consists of keywords related to web services in Sydney. Click on one of those and you’re taken to a page with almost no content, like this one:
Almost no content…just the chosen keyword. So what’s going on? This page accumulates page rank from all the internal links it receives  It gets one from every page in the blog.  And it has a single outgoing link with the same keyword anchor text, which of course is the whole point: passing the benefits of that page rank on to the target site, in order to boost its search ranking.  And that site is: This is the really sad part. Shift Interactive claims to be “one of Sydney’s leaders in corporate blogging, viral marketing, Social Media and Social Networking.” Elsewhere they say they are “a boutique Web 2.0 agency specialising in social media,” and “Sydney SEO specialists with over ten years’ experience in Search Engine Optimisation”. Jamie Harbison’s LinkedIn profile page makes similar claims, and boasts an impressive resume.  So why is this legit-seeming design firm going to the trouble of parasitizing Spoonfed Design?  Because they’re a bunch of unethical slimeballs I guess, and because they can get away with it.

It’s sad because there are so many opportunities to reach out and form positive connections and alliances within the design community.  This clumsy bit of SEO probably has yielded very little benefit to Shift Interactive, because all that lifted content doesn’t relate directly to their Sydney keywords.  But it’s hurting Spoonfed Design.

And that’s partly my fault.  I’ve made it easy for them. I’ve been intending to install a formal copyright notice for some time, but kept putting it off thinking it’s something I’ll get to when I finally do a full site/theme redesign.  Not that it may have made any difference in this case. I just added a copyright claim that will serve for the short term at least. All U.S. bloggers concerned about content theft should make sure they have a clearly written copyright notice such as this. It may not do much as far as prevention, but it will at least assert your rights and establish that anyone taking your content is guilty of copyright infringement, for which there are legal consequences.

I know there are some who may say, why does all this matter? I guess it doesn’t if you have no interest in traffic or search ranking for your site. But like most website owners I do have an interest in those things. Sites like webdesignsydneyaustralia.com impact me in two ways. All that duplicate content is a big negative for SEO and lowers my ranking in Google search results. In addition, the duplicate site is a competitor that may outrank me on searches directly related to my own content, even my own page titles. That’s how I discovered this site in the first place, trying to figure out why spoonfeddesign.com often shows up so poorly in Google SERPS. I get a lot of social traffic here but little from search, and here’s one reason why. These are results on a search for “color scales in Photoshop”.
Not a high traffic search term of course, but a blog like this gets its search traffic from lots of long-tail keywords such as this one.  Positions 5 and 4 are the Sydney rippoff site.  Three and two are Diggs, and I should be able to outrank those!  And what’s that site there at number one?  Could it be?  Yes! Another scraper blog, on the domain neurosoftware.ro.  Full text of SFD’s Photoshop tutorial on color scales with no links or acknowledgment.  I haven’t even begun to try to track this idiot down yet!

It’s demoralizing, and the reality is, there’s only so much time and energy one can devote to dealing with this sort of thing. The brazen nature of the Sydney design rippoff site really got to me though, so my next move is a formal complaint to Google under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). More to say about that in another post.

Does anyone else have experience dealing with this sort of thing? If you run a blog, how much do you care when other sites lift your content?

Scott Norris is a science writer, poet, and design enthusiast. He is the owner of Spoonfed Design.

20 Comments

Leave a Reply

Top of Page