The daily frustrations of operating a news web site.
What you see on Domain Name Wire is only half the story. In addition to churning out content, I spend much of my time battling sploggers who rip off content, trackback spammers, comment spammers, and other nefarious activities.
Sploggers – this is one of my pet peeves. Splogs are blog sites that rip off other content, mostly from RSS feeds. Some splogs are “legal” in that they take a few lines from your story and then link to it; that’s fine. Others are not legal; they copy entire articles. I’ve come across many splogs that show Domain Name Wire’s entire posts, including the copyright notice at the bottom! You can track people splogging you using FairShare.
Trackback Spammers – even more annoying are the sploggers who then automatically ping your articles. Ironically, these trackbacks help you track sploggers.
Comment Spammers – Most of these comments are from automated systems that find your posts and add spammy, link-ridden comments. Thankfully, Askismet Spam for Wordpress catches most of these. But comment spammers are getting tricky. I get a lot of comment spam like this:
“That was a great post…I love this site…Thanks”
“I’ve been reading your site for a while. Great job. Keep up the good work!”
“I hope there’s good info here. It’s my first time on this forum [sic].”
Sometimes these comments include URLs in the body, but other times it’s just in the comment poster’s information, which is then hyperlinked.
Then there are the commentors who write “I found your post through [insert my web site address here] and…” They actually write a real comment, but they include a gratuitous link at the beginning.
Non-attributing content stealers – I made up this category, but this is a web site that basically steals your content, paraphrases it, and doesn’t attribute it to you. There’s a site in the domain industry like that – DomainNews.com (note: not DomainNameNews). I wouldn’t call them out here except that apparently my two emails to them haven’t gotten through. They basically read your stories, change the title a little bit, paraphrase some of it, maybe copy a line or two verbatim from your site, and then don’t give you credit. For example, here are some recent Domain Name Wire headlines followed by similar headlines on DomainNews:
Domain Name Wire: Denver Nuggets and Jim Carrey Fight for Domain Names
DomainNews.com: DenverNuggets.com and JimCarrey.com domain names disputed
Domain Name Wire: Salesforce.com Registers 21 Trademarked Domain Names
DomainNews.com: Over 20 trademarked domain names registered by Salesforce.com
Domain Name Wire: A Wacky Domain Dispute in Orange County
DomainNews.com: Interesting domain arbitration case in Orange County
In fact, if you have a site on Domaining.com, you’ll likely find some oddly similar articles on DomainNews.com
What you should know – sometimes DNW’s comment system throws out good comments. If you comment and see the message “your comment is awaiting moderation”, then I’ll get to it soon. If you submit a comment and it just disappears, then it’s probably in the spam folder and will be deleted. In this case e-mail me the comment and I’ll approve it.
DomainNews.com you should be ashamed of yourselves! It’s about time you called them out on this Andrew
DomainNews has been doing that for a long time.
I often wondered why you, Mike and Ron didn’t complain before this.
DNN is usually a “johnny-come-lately” with industry news except on active auctions.
(another pet peeve)
Andrew, as you know, there is the one guy (probably others) that always post “great info” “thanks for info” etc. And, you know the only reason Robbie F. posted is so he would get a link to his new site of the month.
That is why I’m always suspicious of the guys that include a http link in their screen name.
@ Domain Investor – he got better about that after everyone got on him. But yeah, if it’s a different link every time it kinda makes you wonder.
Great post, DomainNameWire.com author. I’ve enjoyed reading DomainNameWire.com author’s posts here. Thought provoking. Makes sense.
(Insert link to useless website here.)
DomainInvestor.
Please do NOT mistake DomainNews.com with DNN aka DomainNameNews.com . We are not the same by any stretch. We actually write not rewrite.
I’ve noticed DomainNews.com ripping off some of my articles as well.. They’re even stupid enough to post paraphrased articles the very same day — how dumb is that!?
@ Domain Investor: I like to post on other people’s blogs myself – not for the 1 or 2 uniques or nofollow backlink but just to say “Hey I read your post, I got somethink useful for reading it, so I’m going to leave a comment out of appreciation.” I think some domainers are sometimes a bit too suspicious of the intentions of others, but then again with everything that goes on in the industry, perhaps that is a better way to be…
Way to go Andrew! Name and Shame 🙂
The popular EuroDNS.com registrar is the owner of DomainNews.com
If my memory does not fail they pay people to generate news content, probably not enough as it appears their mainly copy others blog content…
You should send a personal note to Xavier Buck about your copycat problems, I am sure they will quickly act to stop immediately these bad practices. There is big chances Xavier is not even aware about this fact.
2007 They got in troublem – read
http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2007/05/31/domainnewscom-steal-other-sites-content/
Its Sad, But Cybersquatters are Natural Scammers,
Andrew, Unfortnunately 50% of your readers are scammers.
M Scrupples quote –
“Its Sad, But Cybersquatters are Natural Scammers,
Andrew, Unfortnunately 50% of your readers are scammers.”
Boy, you really paint with a wide brush !!!
Do you have any idea how many readers DNW might have monthly?
And, how many are occasional lookers and how many are real daily followers?
Do you also figure that 50% of the police and politians are corrupt?
It only takes 5% of any group to make the rest of the group look bad.
M Scrupples, I believe you need to re-adjust your number.
From 2007 post on Mneylon.com
“DomainNews is very aware of this issue now and you will not find copied material on our site anymore. So, once again CUT US SOME SLACK unless you want to do the hard work we are doing yourself.”
uh-huh
If they’re ripping off your content, like they did to me (see mentions from other commentators above) do what I did and DMCA them. It won’t have any impact on them directly, as they don’t host in the US, but by getting them completely removed from Google and other indices it will hurt them where they feel it most
Call them out on it at every turn.
Their main “problem” was their total inability to comprehend basic copyright
*sigh*
Michele
Technically, I don’t know that it would violate copyright. Just ethics.
Cancel “pingback” and cancel “website” in the comments that should fix a lot
“Cancel “pingback” and cancel “website” in the comments that should fix a lot”
I hate to throw the baby out with the bath water. Pingbacks have legitimate uses.
On my non-domain site where I post articles many times each week I get comment spam like yours saying “nice site” and then they bury their URL in a ———- line so when I get the email notice, I don’t see the URL. Very creative… in a bad way.
I droppped pingbacks years ago.
What are they good for?
Blog spammers suck. Cant stand them.
BTW, if anyone is interested in a free credit report hit me up.
Guys,
We know each other in the industry, so a simple email directly to me and telling the problem is much easier and much faster.
I am sorry, for the content taken in some articles. We have a few new writers which are not from theindustry and I need to explain them how to use news from other sources. The deal we had with most guys from the industry is that either we have our own stries or we take a small part of the news and link to them.
So indead here is now something wrong we need to rectify and we will do so.
Our goal is to build an industry, to attract newcomers, to get the industry known.
That is in the interest of all of us. When you do not like the way we list the news simply write to us and we will adapt to your comments. I will inform our writers to be mre carefull to correctly redirect to their sources.
Regards,
Xavier
Xavier – I emailed your ‘editor’ editor @ domainnews.com and never heard back.
You might consider adding a second,’Summary’ rss feed. (For wordpress I recommend dualfeeds http://www.scratch99.com/wordpress-plugin-dualfeeds/). That way an aggregator has the option of doing it the nice way- a few lines with a link back to your full post. The other side of this is compulsive bloggers spewing out content for SERPs etc. where maybe one in 10 posts has any real meat to it. A good aggregator can save me a lot of time by culling the filler.
>>>> Andrew, as you know, there is the one guy (probably others) that always post “great info” “thanks for info” etc. And, you know the only reason Robbie F. posted is so he would get a link to his new site of the month. <<<<
This guy Robbie is a scammer really. He goes about marketing other people’s domain names for sale which he has no authority.
I’ve seen some of his posts on NamePros where he tried to dupe Snapnames once & entice other people not to bid on that name. He goes by the name RobFer.
Here is the thread for proof. Hmmm, Do I need to mention anything ? People like him are a liability.
http://www.namepros.com/warnings-and-alerts/543290-warning-dmg-com-snapnames-auction.html
“Pingbacks have legitimate uses.”
Hm I ignore them completely because usually they are spam or just leads to some scrap which leads back to the original article (circle-jerking)
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.
@ Domain Investor – sure, it’s completely OK to write about something someone else has discovered and refer back to that article.
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.
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.
Andrew, if you’re still having trouble with trackback spammers, try this plugin:
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/
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.
@ 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.