Attack of the scrapers
by Rob Mason ~ January 20th, 2008 Filed under: Rant, Useful stuff.
Update: thanks to the website owner the content in question has been removed
Apparently even lowly websites such as mine can be attacked by scrapers! For those not in the know, scrapers are low-born scum whose websites serve only to prey on other people’s RSS feeds, publish that content and then pass it off as their own.
It seems as though by mentioning certain current rock bands in your content can get you targeted. I won’t mention the phrase again, but will just say a recent article compared a member of a rock band with a well known usability expert! Posting this article in turn led to my content appearing on a splog.
Three things led to me becoming more aware of this type of underhand activity:
1) David Airey, who’s been having some truck recently with his website, posted an article on stopping people hot-linking to your images. Basically doing that is theft. Fair enough I thought, thank god I don’t have a high ranking site such as his! Hmm…
2) Google Alerts. An(other) amazing service from the big G, that essentially allows you to type in some keywords or phrases you wish to track, in my case Rob Mason and Sponge Project. Google will then ping you a message each time their crawlbots come across the word or phrase. An email comes in and I think “hang on a sec…that’s my article!”, so some investigation ensues.
3) A good ‘ol trackback into the comment section of said article led me to the splog in questio, which has now been deleted.
The long and the short of it is that my content has been stolen. It’s not much, it was only a small, funny article, but you let one get away they’ll all start.
Webmasters beware!
Contact Rob for details on website design and build services in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.