Yesterday (September 23), I logged into my Wordpress Admin panel to tweak something in my theme. In the “Recent Links” area on the dashboard, I saw a link marked “Is Web Design an Art?” I knew I’d previously written a post by that name before, so I checked it out. It was an exact duplicate of my post on a blog located at “webmaster-source.blogspot.com” (I’m not linking for obvious reasons). Upon further inspection, I found that they’d copied huge quantities of my posts (over the course of a day). I’d found a “splog” (Spam Blog) that had been scraping my feed. Making matters worse, the site was loaded with AdSense ads.

Since then, I’ve contacted Blogger and AdSense, requesting that they take action. I’ve not received a response from AdSense yet (just an autoresponder saying that they’d received my message). Blogger sent an email back though. They say they won’t do anything unless I send them a DMCA takedown notice (through snail mail). I guess I’ll have to prepare one then. Google isn’t very helpful in the anti-splog department, are they?

The splog scraped my content about 11 days ago, and hasn’t come back since. Though with a name like it has, it’s probably only a matter of time. What’s the best way to stop them? I can’t find an entry in my Feedburner stats, nor in my server logs. I have no idea what IP is scraping the feed either. I assume it’s automated, but I’m not quite sure.

If anyone has anti-splog tips, feel free to post them in the comments.

Tags: General