Splog Mechanics
We all know of the situation, you work hard researching a blog post and you get it out to the most people possible through the many publishing methods on the web making your content work for you. Then you notice that your very much colorful blog is losing authority and find that your RSS feeds are being tapped by unknown people stealing your content and claiming them as their own getting the exposure you should have been and not even giving you any credit for it. Call it copy/paste, plagiarism and even plagiarism but stealing is stealing yet with the problem out in the open, why hasn’t anybody thought of a way to seek these sites and shut them down? Even the many a brilliant minds out there on the net have admitted again and again that the net is too vast a territory to police and such activities are too random and predictable at the same time that there is no specific way to root them out.
One method employed by established bloggers is to use an AntiLeech plug-in which creates a fake blog post for them to lock onto, at the same time obtaining their IP Addresses and blocking further attempts by these crazy bots from stealing further content. It also works by setting up the fake blogs with a link-back that links back to your site that can be annoying to the splogger. There is a problem though, any content already stolen is not recoverable and as fast as it does it’s work to prevent the act, the bot adapts and changes IP address again getting hold of more of your precious posts. The fake posts look legit enough to trap these splogging bots yet they are reacting seemingly as if preempting such actions. More in the coming posts on how these nuisance programs work and how we can fight back.
