Dealing With Splogs (Or Anyone Stealing Your Content via RSS)

RSS is a great way to distribute and syndicate content to your readers, but it also makes it easy for the spammers to steal your content. One way they do this is by setting up spam blogs, or “splogs.” These blogs have no original content; instead, they pull in your content via RSS and pass it off as their own.

They’re using your content without so much as a link back to your site!

Earlier this year, this very blog was included in one such site at adwhores.com. I wasn’t too pissed considering the blog had a PR5, and if I played my cards right, I could get some nice backlinks. But then I noticed the PR5 was faked…

The good news, though, is that the splog got shut down within 2 days. Even better, I learned a thing or two about dealing with this problem (other than a typical DMCA notice to Google.)

And it’s a good thing, because that splog is back online and stealing more content than ever! They’re even stealing Shoemoney’s feed!

So here are a couple things you can do to protect yourself from splogs, even if you don’t know they’re out there:

First, always link back to your previous posts when you mention something you’ve blogged about before. Or link to one of your category pages. Whatever you do, just be sure to have links to other parts of your site within the post itself. That way, anyone stealing your content is giving you backlinks, and maybe even traffic.

Second, you can put a little notice at the bottom of each post. Something like “this post originally appeared at mysite.com.” That should get you a little link love, too. You can even use Adsense Deluxe to automate the process.

Third, make use of all the Feedburner options. Feedburner allows you to place links in your feed such as “Email this” and “Save to del.icio.us” If those are in your feed, they’ll show up on the splog. So if someone decides to bookmark the post that way or email it to a friend, they’ll be saving your URL (not the splog’s.)

(Notice my feed URL in the status bar )

And if you do know about the splog, and it is totally worthless and spammy, just file the DMCA notice along with these tips from FightSplog.

[This post originally appeared at InternetMarketingSucks.com]

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