The Friday gathering – Annoying scrapers addition

By glblguy

One of the things you learn pretty quick as a blogger is the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Getting your pages ranked high on search engine result pages can bring very large amounts of traffic. That traffic turns into potential new readers and commentators. Search engine visitors are also the visitors most likely to click on your ads as well. While I don’t make a great deal here on Gather Little by Little, it does pay the hosting fees, compensates me for the time I spend writing, and supplements my income some.

I’ve also learned over the past few months that writing SEO optimized posts also increases the number of posts you’ll have stolen by spblogs. Spblogs are sites that scrape (i.e. steal, plagiarize, etc.) other blog’s content, publish it and surround it with advertising, typically Google Adsense. They do this to rank in search engines and generate income through ads with little to no effort. Spbloggers create lots of these sites. I’m not going to link to any as I don’t want encourage or promote them.

I must be doing a fairly decent job writing SEO optimized content, as all 5 articles this week were picked up by 4 different Spblogs. The splogs not only posted my copyrighted and original content, but even posted the images I use. The images link back to my site and thus whenever they display one it uses my bandwidth which I pay for.

To fight back a bit, I’ve started replacing the images with a different image. I leave the original image in my articles, but replace the one the spblogs link to with this:

While I am sure most of the spbloggers won’t even notice, my hope is that people that visit the sites will realize what’s going on and never visit them again, let alone click on ads.

If you ever happen to visit a splog and notice they are publishing another blogs content please let the original publisher know so they can report the spbloggers to Google and the spblog’s hosting company.

Important Stuff

  • Moolanomy celebrated it’s first birthday this week. Congratulations Pinyo and have enjoyed blogging with you over the past year. You’re a business partner and friend and very glad we hooked up.
  • Consumerism Commentary celebrated it’s 5-year anniversary this week. Congratulations Flexo! Flexo is not only a awesome blogger but also a huge contributor to the personal finance community. He runs pfblogs.org, the Carnival of Personal Finance and a number of other ventures.
  • Adam from Money Relationship is giving away a $50 gift card. Adam’s blog is pretty new so check it out and leave a comment, subscribe, and/or email him with a question to enter. The details are located in his sidebar.
  • Ryan from Millionaire Money Habits has a new eBook called Fico Formula which shares TONS of information on how credit scores work and what to do to increase yours. I’ve personally reviewed the book and it’s very well done, professional, and loaded with great information.

The Gathering

Here are my favorite article picks this week from the M-Network and beyond!

Photo by: Christina Welsh (Rin)

Related posts:

  1. The Friday gathering for 5/30/2008
  2. The Friday Gathering for 10/5/2007
  3. The Friday Gathering – Broken Arm Edition
  4. The Friday Gathering for 11/30/2007
  5. The Friday Gathering for 2/1/2008


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13 Responses (including trackbacks) to “The Friday gathering – Annoying scrapers addition”

  1. Miranda Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 7:15 am

    I’ve been seeing an increase of scrapers as well. *sigh* Great tips/idea on replacing the picture link, though! I’ll have to remember that one!

  2. Pinyo Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 7:51 am

    Thank you Gibble. It’s has been an amazing year. Thank you for being there throughout the entire journey.

  3. Curious Cat Investment Blog Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 8:07 am

    Great idea: very nice use of images.

  4. Nicole Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 8:34 am

    I think this is great but I’m wondering, how do you figure out your content is being copied? do you just do a Google search with a sentence from your post in it to see what comes up?

  5. Ron@TheWisdomJournal Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 8:52 am

    I take it you like to be ASKED to guest post??? LOL!
    Love your approach!

  6. That One Caveman Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 9:36 am

    Those scrapers are really getting annoying. Not only are they stealing your content, but they’re potentially lowering your ranking since Google will see multiple copies of the same content out there. It’s a bad deal.

  7. Kristen Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 11:15 am

    Thanks for the post Gibble. My agency’s personal finance blog has been picked up by the spblogs (though I didn’t know what they were called). We’ve sent letters to the site that is picking them because unfortunately there is some content on those sites that we simply don’t want to be associated with. We’re not getting very far short of taking legal action.

    It’s really frustrating. One of the sites even attached a state goverment employee’s name to one of my posts. The state, as you can imagine, is less than pleased and looking into it.

  8. thefrugalhousewife Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    Since I’m new to blogging, how do you tell when you’ve been hit by one of the spblogs?

    Also, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoy reading your articles.

    Thanks for all the great info!!!

  9. Squawkfox Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    Hey GLBL!

    This post got splogged too. :(
    I’ve almost given up on sploggers. I hope to outrank my own splogged content by seeing more incoming links to the original post. So I thank you for the mention!

    @frugalhousewife You’ll discover your splogged content by seeing incoming links to your posts. By visiting those links you’ll see your entire post copied, or scraped. It doesn’t feel good, so I hope you never see it happen.

  10. glblguy Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    @Nicole/thefrugalhousewife – I see the trackbacks show up. I always include links back to my articles with the full URL path, that way went they post my content I receive a trackback. I use a plugin called no-self-pings to keep my posts from placing trackbacks on my own articles. Just like Squawkfox said.

    @thefrugalhousewife – Thank you! Glad to have you as a reader!

    @Squawkfox – I figured it would. I kind of hoped they might get the message :-)

  11. Ryan Says:
    July 19th, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Hey Gibble,

    Thanks mentioning the FICO Formula and for your kind feedback. I really like your scraper image too. That’s smart!

  12. Patrick Says:
    July 19th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    Great job with the image. ;)

    And thanks for the link. :)

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