The Venture Skills Blog

This is a quick post regarding duplicate content and follows on from a discussion at web digitity forum. Here on the Venture Skills blog and a couple of our clients blogs we have been suffering from people scraping our content (taking the content and ripping it in full) The article is then republished with a link at the bottom pointing to our blog. Why is this a problem a links a link after all and it is getting the word out.

Several reasons why you would not want this to occur,

• It’s just plain rude paticularly with lines like “great article” placed at the bottom we recently placed a short post with less then 3 lines on a blog to have it scraped (the post was linking to a couple of tutorials on this blog) the scraped content is then re-printed along with the over enthusiastic its a great read at the bottom uhuh sure it is, the tutorials by the way are a great read.
• Some one may actually think that the scrapper is doing so at your request.
• Google may think the scrapper is doing so at your request!
• Ok we don’t have advertisement on our site but you may do and its your revenue you lose.

So now your going to ask how to stop it!

The short answer is there isn’t an easy way, if your using wordpress.com you just have to live with it (the current bout of splogs seem to be specifically scraping only wordpress.com blogs and only certain keywords. You could try a ceist and desist style email if you can find an address but I suspect that is unlikely to help your cause. So in effect this is a wasted blog post but at least it was a fun rant. by the way if your not reading this at http://ventureskills.wordpress.com your probably on a splog right now!

Like what you see try these articles on the Venture Skills Network
Google Custom Search Engine – Using Ajax Search with the new CSE
Information mining the social way – Using del.icio.us to mine your competitors
What’s the future for Google Apps for your Domain – A wish List

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