Help Defeat the Sploggers with AntiLeech
I had an online conversation yesterday with an acquaintence of mine. She was alarmed to have found that her entire site’s content had been republished by some other site!
Apparently, their site had been sucking on her site’s RSS file for quite some time, and managed to download a sizeable chunk of data, which they subsequently republished with their own ads strewn about. And she’s not the only one by a long shot.
If you’re not aware of this phenomenon, it’s generally referred to as “Splogging”, for “spam blogging”. The idea is usually to re-blog content form other people’s blogs to gain emphasis on their popular terms for your splog site.
For example, if I wanted my site to be a popular search result for “student loans”, first I would install a blog on my server. I would then use some software to aggregate, say, the Technorati feed for posts tagged with “student loans”, which gives me a rich bed of content to start populating my site. Using some some dodgy plugins sold by less-than-respectable authors, I can even have WordPress do all of this work for me.
Then, I sprinkle a few links onto the splog that point to my money-making page, and voila! Instant PageRank!
The bottom line for bloggers is that your popular content will be stolen and used to fuel a link farm that profits someone else. How nice. So what do you do to combat it? I have a suggestion or two.