[Weird trackbacks] Hey, that was my post!

[thewalsho]

Originally Posted by Ferox

Can you tell how old it is? It may be an attempt to set up an easy blog for PPP.

That's what I was thinking too.

[jshaffstall]

These are generally blogs that pull content from RSS feeds using automated software.

The goal is to rank highly enough in Google for various long-tail keywords to pull in some search traffic and convert it into Adsense clicks.

Since the blogs are automated, they can turn them out as fast as they can register domain names and install the software. This is often combined by linking the sites to each other to artificially drive up the PR of all the sites.

The amount of income from one of these sites is pretty trivial, but the cost to set it up is also trivial, so most of what's made is profit.

Jay

[Zhuli]

Thanks for the clear explanation!

So is there anything we can do? I'm tired of seeing my posts on some diet blog, loan blog etc. These are junk... and I wish I weren't on them.

[jshaffstall]

Originally Posted by Zhuli

Thanks for the clear explanation!

So is there anything we can do? I'm tired of seeing my posts on some diet blog, loan blog etc. These are junk... and I wish I weren't on them.

Unfortunately, no. On the web you have no control over who links to you.

There's never any contact information on the blogs. I supposed you could go to their ISP and try to get them shut down, but by posting short excerpts and linking back to the original blog, they're not really stealing content. At least not in the same sense as the people who take entire posts and don't link back.

You can make sure their trackbacks don't show up as comments in your posts, though, so that at least you aren't linking to them. I regularly delete these sorts of trackback comments when they appear, especially since I use the DoFollow plugin.

The blogs will be shut down by Google eventually, in the form of being removed from the Google index, but by then the person who started it will have started another couple dozen.

Jay

[Zhuli]

I see...

Well, I deleted all the trackbacks (I usually do anyway) and I install the wp-ban plugin, so I was able to block a few attempt for the same blog.

Thanks for your explanations Jay, I appreciate!

[pelf81]

This has been one of the questions I have been meaning to ask, but never got around to it because I didn't know how to. I mean, who are those people behind those blogs? Are they even human? And why are they scraping our materials on their blogs? How are they earning from those scraped materials?

And you know what? The most frustrating thing is that you can't call them splogs, because they actually link to your original post, instead of calling those posts theirs!

[PaulR]

Originally Posted by Zhuli

Thanks for the clear explanation!

So is there anything we can do? I'm tired of seeing my posts on some diet blog, loan blog etc. These are junk... and I wish I weren't on them.

You can always add some copyright protection to your feed.
Simple Feed Copyright: Wordpress Plugin
WordPress › ©Feed « WordPress Plugins

Best of luck

[pelf81]

I copyrighted my feed already, but my contents are being stripped too

[jshaffstall]

Adding a copyright notice won't stop the automatic programs from taking the content. It might make an ethical human who honestly thought it was okay to take the content think twice, but those aren't the people who generate these spam blogs.

The digital fingerprint plugins (another one at WordPress Plugin: Digital Fingerprint — detecting content theft -- MaxPower ) are promising ways to locate stolen content, especially when they don't just post an excerpt and link back to the original post.

But they don't do anything to stop the theft in the first place.

Jay

[Red_Virus]

That is called TrackBack spam, that is all done with an automate software and is a black hat technique of getting some backlinks to your site.