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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