The New Face Of Spamblogs Part 3

In part 1 of this series I explained that I found a spamblog stealing content from one of my blogs. In part 2 I showed that this spamblog was part of an elaborate spam network that was stealing content from over 300 blogs.

The content of the spamblogs in this network was stolen from blogs with two common features (in addition to being Blogspot blogs):

1. No copyright notice was visible on the blog or in the site feed.
2. The site feed was set to 'full' - which means most, or all, of the text of a post was displayed.

Content on blogs is copyright protected whether there is a copyright notice showing or not. Unless there is notification in the blog saying content may be used one must ask permission to use it.

Some blogs use Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow some freedom of use but any restrictions must be adhered to. A 'cc' license doesn't mean a user can do everything with the content or use it anywhere.

If you find that a blog is using your content without your permission you can ask the blogger to remove it. If that doesn't work you can report the blog to the blog host if it is known. You can also report spamblogs and copyright issues to Google and other search engines. Check to see if the site uses Google Adsense. If it does report the blog to Google.

You don't have to feel helpless when faced with content theft. Things may seem to be taking some time to fix and you may be frustrated. The easiest thing to do is blog about it. Explain what is going on and how you are dealing with it. You can link to the post with the stolen content BUT don't link to any spamblog - that is just sending them traffic. It is better to write the URL without using a link and let people copy it to their browsers.

Reading List

Copyright

What is Copyright Protection?

Content Theft

Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements

What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

The Worst Excuse for Content Theft

Site Feeds

If you decide to use a full site feed on your blog consider adding a copyright notice.

Do You Need Permission to Use Feeds

Adding A Copyright Notice To Your Site Feed

Full versus Partial RSS Feeds

Feed guarding: Protecting your weblog content from theft — or worse fates . . .

Spam Blogs

How To Spot a Splog

Reporting Spam Blogs

Do You Really Want To Delete Your Blog? - explains how deleted blogs can end up becoming spamblogs.

Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud

How Spam Blogs Cheat Technorati

The New Face Of Spamblogs Part 2

In part 1 of this series I explained about finding a blog that had stolen content from one of my blogs. I suspected that it was a spamblog and that it was one of several hosted at addapad.com.

In this post I will show that content has been stolen from other blogs. I will also talk about addapad.com ,a similar site called thewhatblog.com, and the two search engines they are connected to. I will keep the links to these sites to a minimum since I don't want to send them traffic or boost their pageranks.

When I discovered the extent of the content theft from my blog I started investigating blogs hosted at addapad. I looked at quite a few blogs and then began searching for post titles in Google. I found that the stolen content all comes from Blogspot blogs.

Here are some examples:

Looking For 'Dryland' is a post from Sonya's Grab Bag. Here is how it appears on thsangelhsnohalo:



Good morning... is a post from Artsy Catsy. It also appears at grneyedfairie:



When I was investigating the spamblogs I used the search boxes found on most of them. I was taken to a webpage at searchmat.com and found that every outgoing link lead either to addapad.com or thewhatblog.com. The latter is another blog host that uses WordPress. It is set up like addapad and is associated with find-a-blog.com which is identical to searchmat. Some searches at find-a-blog lead to addapad.

The two search engines are the only places where I found any advertising. Both use Google Adsense. If the ads were in any of the spamblogs they would be violating Google's TOS. They may still violate the terms of service.



The ads could be the ultimate point of this network. The stolen content and referrer spam from the few blogrolls attracts people to the blogs. Visitors poke around and eventually find the search engines and the ads. Some people will click on the ads and escape what is essentially a well crafted and subtle maze.

The network may not seem like a spam operation at first but a quick Google search shows that many sites are dealing with 'referrer spam' from both hosts. Referrer spam screws up site stats and messes with Internet searches.

People dealing with referrer spam are being inconvenienced. Bloggers having their content stolen and used this way are being insulted. When we find a blogger taking our stuff we have someone tangible to contact or blame for our troubles. These generic spamblogs are faceless and unnerving. How do you fight something intangible? Just figuring out who to contact is frustrating.

I wondered how many other blogs were effected by this. Every blog on addapad and thewhatblog is stealing content from one Blogspot blog. I did a search at Technorati and found out that addapad had 112 blogs listed and thewhatblog 218. These two sites plagiarize at least 330 blogs!

This spam network is something I haven't seen before. I have seen individual splogs linked together before but not like this. When each component is looked at separately they look legitimate. When seen together they look like pieces of an elaborate scam.

In part 3 of this series I will present ways bloggers can deal with content theft.