Combating Splogs

I recently noticed another blog that I run was getting an increasing number of trackbacks to my most recent posts. Seems like good news at first...people are liking what I write and writing about it on their own blogs. Not the case though.

Upon a little closer inspection I found a few different sites with the exact same content as I had posted to my blog just minutes beforehand. Spam blogs or more commonly splogs. These splogs were reading my blog's content from my RSS feed and then posting it to their site literally minutes after I post it.

This is bad news. Google and the other search engines do not look favorably upon duplicate content and there's no guarantee that the search bots will visit my blog before the splog. If the splog gets indexed first then there could potentially be penalties for my blog.

So what options do legitimate bloggers have against splogs?

1. Flag the Blog - If the splog is hosted on blogspot, click the flag button in Blogger to report a blogspot splog.


2. Report the blog - Splog Reporter and SplogSpot are two services looking to aggregate a list of splogs. Not sure how effective they are but worth a try.


3. If the splog uses AdSense, tell Google that they are violating the AdSense Terms of Service - To do this Click on the Ads by Google link on any of the AdSense ads on the splog. Then select "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw." From there its pretty self-explanatory, just report that the site is using your content to profit from AdSense.


4. Contact the splog owner and ask them to discontinue using your feed - Not much chance of this succeeding but it still might be worth a shot. A WhoIs search would be the place to start. If that fails then you could try leaving a comment on the splog. Again, this method has slim to no chance of working but might be worth a try.

In my case, I have pursued all of the above options. I'll be sure to post again on any success (or failure) that I have in reducing my splogs stealing my content.