It is thus no surprise that various sectors – and individuals as well – have made it their mission to help bring down splogs (including us).  This endeavor also means taking certain steps on your part to ensure that your blog content is protected to a certain degree.  After all, if sploggers were to have a harder time stealing content, they just might give it up.

What can you do to make it hard for sploggers to steal your content?

Plugins

There are many plugins that you can utilize to make it harder for sploggers to steal your content. They work in various ways, the end goal being the same: to protect your content. Some plug ins work by disabling functions that will allow the text to be manually copied. Others work by feeding bots fake content when they try to steal the content. Take a look around and see what you can use to protect your posts.

Data service centers/Web hosting services

You may not think about it, but your web hosting company might play a role in the security of your data. After all, the information that you post in your blog will be stored in the data center used by your web host. If they have security issues, sploggers may be the least of your worries. What can you do? Make sure that you choose the right web hosting company – one that will ensure the security of your data.

Of course, sploggers are quite devious in that they also have other ways of going around this easy tell. Some sploggers actually have hidden link information. This means that when you hover over a link in a splog you won’t see the link appearing in the status bar. Of course, when you think about it, a legitimate web site won’t go through the trouble of hiding a link so, ironically enough, it becomes another clue that you are visiting a splog.

These splogs are just a list of links leading to their advertisers. Usually the advertisers are often called sponsors, which in a way is also true because these are companies that pay to be included in the list.

Advertisers get benefits from being in splogs. The link points to their site and their keywords can now be found by search engines in another location. Of course, the advertising benefit is there as their coverage increases on the internet.

Sploggers (these guys are growing like weeds on the netosphere) will use the most inventive ways in employing feeds to get juicy content from other sites and then pass it off as their own content. they typically use variations of certain tactics to mask their splog and pass it off as benign site.

One tactic sploggers use is to grab feeds from different sites that have content that is similar or related to the splog’s “content”. They then use the excerpts in a manner that is similar to a blockquote — and this will even include links to the original source through the feed. There are those who are more brazen with getting content. These sploggers will lift the whole articles and content from the various related feeds and pass it off as their own. It’s really unfair especially for those whose content has been basically stolen.

To be fair, not a lot of blogs really give you all original content. Most blogs will feature posts that quote from the posts of other people or other websites, while other just post links directly to the content the blog owner finds interesting. There is actually nothing wrong with this and this is not what a splog does. A splog will be devoid of absolutely any kind of original content and will have a wanton disregard for Fair Use by completely ignoring the use of block quotes by just pasting the derived content on their blog without any kind of attribution or sign that it was lifted from another source.

A good way to find out about splogs through its content is by going to the suspicious blog’s categories and its archives looking at signs of whether the content was written as an original piece. This can be quite difficult but you’ll see subtle signs that an article was lifted entirely from another site.

When you go to a dubious looking blog check out the categories and the archives based on the date. If you see that posts number in the hundreds or thousands at some point in the past but absolutely nothing (or very few) since then, or if you notice that the posts are quite erratic (hundreds of posts in one month, a two month lull and then another burst of blogs after three months) then your splog radar should start pinging loudly.

One of the ways of determining if a blog is actually a splog is by paying attention to the content. A real blog actually makes sense in how it is published. The content matches the links and the title. Splogs do not care about matching or having an actual internal design. The content will not match the links or even the blog’s title or the post title. There are even some posts where the signature or the name in the article doesn’t match the name of the post author.

Another example of how splogs do not “add up” is that the sentences or the thoughts being expressed in the post don’t make sense. You could be reading a post on a popular TV show that will suddenly turn into a description of a porn movie. This will also extend to how paragraphs are composed — usually with each paragraph talking about really unrelated subjects — for example, a post that begins with a tour of India turns into a description of a new drug then becomes a paragraph hawking a new diet. Even how the sentences are constructed is made haphazardly, you’d swear some random guy just began typing all of the English words he knows.

When you see these things happening in a blog you’re reading, stop. You’re just going to waste your time reading a splog.