Would you do a little Christmas lagniappe for me, please?
Go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the theft shown at this URL:
http:// www.ebliss.us/2008/12/posting-bookmarks-online
You’ll need to remove the space after http:// that I inserted to avoid giving the jerk proprietor a gratuitous link.
When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the “ebliss” homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URL of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put that into the box to report the specific offense. Remember to remove that extra space after the double slash.
It’s one thing, I suppose, for the damned scrapers to knock off a single paragraph and then post a link, though I don’t like it that they use even a few of my words for the purpose of making money off my work. But when someone takes an entire post and sticks it online under a slew of ads…no. That will not do. Especially when, as in this case, he presents it as his own work. And, as in this case, his site is swimming in ads.
Lately I’ve been hiding my byline in white type after the first graf of posts I think will be scraped, and then deeper in the post placing another byline with a link to a FaM or Copyeditor’s Desk post with instructions on how to report the theft to Google’s advertising department. This may (with luck, I gather) cause Google to yank its ads from the word-thief’s site, effectively putting it out of business. The schmuck who ripped off today’s post didn’t even bother to delete those, probably because he has a machine committing his thefts.
Gee. Imagine how nice it would be to have a robot that you could send out to burglarize houses, knock over jewelry stores, and lift Porterhouse steaks off the Safeway’s butcher counters….
Funny – this seems to be happening a LOT to you. How do you find these stolen posts? It makes me very nervous as I’m not looking around to see if mine are being stolen, and maybe I should be. What do I do to figure it out? I read your blog at Bloglines usually, and the posts have different background colors when there is more than one, so I’ve seen your tagline buried in there and figured you were doing it to prevent plagiarism from happening.
Amazingly, they ping the site. Usually, Akismet shows them as spam, though occasionally they slip through as legit comments.
You can, I understand, Google your post title and sometimes bring up scrapers. This, however, strikes me as more trouble than it’s worth. Really, if all they’re doing is lifting a graf and the linking back to your site, they’re upping your page rank, so that’s nothing to get excited about. What irks me is people who lift my copy and republish it, in toto, on their own site as though they wrote it. Grrr grrr grrr!
I’ve noticed that Blueprint for Financial Prosperity always puts a line at the bottom of his posts that the post originated at his blog. I assume this has something to do with post theft. If a computer is doing the lifting I assume this sentence makes it through. I had also wondered how one discovered one’s stolen articles.
I did report them.
Funny, I just looked up this post of yours today again because I got a pingback from a site that is stealing content. Thanks for this post, because now I know where to go to report them. Back when I first responded to this post, I was still using Blogger. Now that I’m using WordPress, I’m getting the pings you talked about, and now it all makes sense!
@ Mrs. A: Glad to be of assistance.
Even WordPress doesn’t always give you a pingback on all the sploggers out there. Sometimes if you google a post of your own it will bring up all sorts of spog echoes.
Most of the time it’s not worth complaining about a splog that links to your site. After all, it’s just another link for you, and every link helps raise your page ranking. Usually, they steal a few lines or a paragraph and then post a “read the rest here” link that takes them to your blog. You can set the program, I think, to not emit pingbacks. What I objected to in this post is that the jerk had lifted an entire article and posted it on his site as his own work.