Comments on: Comment Spam, Sploggers and Content Thieves, Oh My!

By: Andrew Allemann

Andrew Allemann — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:41:50 +0000

@ Reece – very interesting. The thing is that blogs don’t have to license the content of comments, so technically this service could be infringing copyright.

By: Reece Berg

Reece Berg — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 09:05:58 +0000

I came across a new type of comment spammer today — a comment spammer that steals comments made by someone on all the domain blogs they post on.

Have a look at this: http://www.backtype.com/url/llll.com?page=1

Not impressed.. I just hope Google doesn’t view the blogs affected as now having duplicate content.

By: Dave Zan

Dave Zan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:44:31 +0000

Andrew, if you’re still having trouble with trackback spammers, try this plugin:

http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:15:25 +0000

What is going on is no mistake. If you want to help the domain space and improve things, then write the content yourself.

Paraphrasing AND citing the articles is mandatory. If you don’t want to do this or see fit to do this, why not just copy the articles in their entirety? It’s MUCH easier to just grab the articles via RSS and link back to the original source then it is to pay someone to reword entire posts. It’s FREE too. You’ve been caught once already and didn’t change, so you’ll probably not change again. Just stop doing it and write your own content or copy the articles and cite the source the appropriate way.

By: bernard

bernard — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:07:12 +0000

It is a real issue as you can find out a decent human content rewriter (and mixer) for as low as 1 cent per word. Such behavior is quite difficult if not impossible to detect automatically.

Google doesn’t seem to penalize quickly such content thieves, even when notified.

If you produce about 1500 words per day, is costs only 15$ a day to get unique and quality, but stolen content.

By: Andrew Allemann

Andrew Allemann — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:47:34 +0000

@ Domain Investor – sure, it’s completely OK to write about something someone else has discovered and refer back to that article.

By: Domain Investor

Domain Investor — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:16:29 +0000

I feel when Andrew, Mike, Ron and others (ie techcrunch, WSJ, Rick S., etc) writes something. It is fair game to take the theme of the story and build on it. As long as the new writer gives credit to others.

It is not ethical when someone scrapes the article and publishes it.
And, paraphrasing is the same as scraping.