Has your Blog been Cloned?
Update, Tuesday Dec. 29:
Either Google took action on the thieving splogger domain, or the owner came to his senses. Either way, the blogsopt domains in question have now seemingly turned into parked domains, which is good news for Blogspot owners. The issue of splogging remains, but evidently crime doesn’t (always) pay.
When you thought Blogspot a.k.a. Blogger was the perfect way to build your Adsense blog empire without initial expenses, along comes someone snatching your blog’s sub-domain with content and re-publishes it with a slight typo in the sub-domain suffix.
Your new blog was most likely cloned at birth, your Adsense ID replaced with that of the perpetrator’s and/or new ad code injected automatically. Copy your Blogspot URL and paste it into your web browser’s URL field, replace blogspot with blogsopt and see what you get. You have my sympathy in advance. And that’s only one of many scrapers.
Clever? Maybe. Smart? Not so much; Google will soon be all over this guy, giving him a red hot spanking for abusing their Adsense program in conjunction with cloned/stolen content. Other, less dim-witted content scrapers don’t risk awakening the G. beast. They do it ninja-style.
This kind of actions is commonly referred to as “splogging” or “blog scraping” and is not limited to Blogspot, but WordPress as well, and Squidoo, Weebly, e.t.c. According to a BHW member, the perpetrator might be using some kind of reverse HTTP Proxy script to fetch the target blog’s content, replace the URL and inject their own links. The content is then returned using a slightly different URL, and receives traffic from mistypers. Easy, huh?
I noticed in a Blogspot blog I had created the other day, which of course has been cloned as well, my other affiliate links remain untouched. So, basically my affiliate links get more publicity.
If you want to find out whether your blog has been cloned and what to do about it:
- Stolen Content – and yes, his blog has been cloned, too: Stolen Content (blogsopt)
- Has your Website been Cloned?
- How long will it take to catch the clones? – Blogger support discussion with elaborate guides
- Jamie Spencer on Splogging
There is little we can do to prevent this from happening, but on the other hand: someone scraping your blog means more publicity for your articles, which can be a good thing, especially if you put affiliate links in your articles. You can also contact the perpetrator with a Cease & Desist message, which may have a sobering effect.
Either way: until Google finds a way to deal with this phenomenon, we’ll just have to live with it.
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Tagged with: blogger • blogspot • splogging • thieves • wordpress
Filed under: Easy Money Central • General • Security
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I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success in your business.
Hi Kathy,
Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it, although I am still a newbie and it takes years to get past that stage for people like me. The good thing is, learning about earning money online includes so many sub-categories such as building websites, maintaining a blog, creating graphics and so on, and all that together makes it a fun and rewarding experience! If you need any help with domain quick indexing, some high PR sites to add back-links with, e.t.c., you can send me a message via the Contact page and I’ll be happy to assist.
Hey, this is my first visit to your blog… We are a group of volunteers and starting a new initiative in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us valuable information to work on. good job
Hi Candice,
Thanks for your comment, and I wish you luck with your project! Feel free to send me a PM, if you would like me to add a link to your site in the links list
Damn, that sound’s so easy if you think about it.
great thing! cipciap *link removed*
Hi Luffie,
Please comment with something relevant, and I’ll be happy to include your link. The main reason this blog is still do-follow is to help fellow IMers build back-links with extra link juice to their domains and projects. Thanks for understanding, and I welcome additional comments from you, as long as it is relevant.