Comments on: Suspicious Blog Activity – any advice?

By: J S

J S — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:43:07 +0000

You recieved the requests because your blog is linked into Planet Debian which has high ranking itself without a method to post links directly there.

I did some backlink checks on Goodreads and found Planet Debian is one of their higher ranked backlinks due to a couple of posts, like yours.

(I’m an indie fiction author who uses Linux and thought I’d follow the rabbit hole a little).

By: Tom (amindfv)

Tom (amindfv) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:14:42 +0000

@Andreas: that’s not right. For all creative works in the U.S. the default (if you write no notice) is copyright ownership by the author.

By: ZERUCH

ZERUCH — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:59:11 +0000

Ironically, I found this blog post looking into the very thing its about. I got a similar email just today and I found it…not right.

Thanks for helping confirm my suspicions.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Thu, 31 May 2012 10:25:47 +0000

Lacking expertness in licensing-issues, I would guess that if you do not license your blog-posts at all, the default is that they are in the public domain, so everyone can do whatever they like with your content legally.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:11:37 +0000

It is a cool idea, but the problem is that it isn’t a “fire and forget” sort of solution. If I have to keep putting time into it every so often, it’s not going to work out too well for me.

By: me

me — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:01:49 +0000

I really like @nobody’s solution. If you find an IP overlap, you could implement a system where those IPs get tons of p0rrn and other non-safe content when they access your website. This way, they will probably be excluded from most Google (and other) searches by the “safety filter”. This will reduce their visibility to ther Internet, totally making their plans fail :)

By: Justin Dugger

Justin Dugger — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:16:19 +0000

I figure there’s not much you can do to stop the copying if you want to keep publishing RSS. So instead, you just abuse it. How many of those copy farms are altering your links? By simply referring to previous posts in your new posts, you might end up with a dozen copycat sites linking to yours.

We did get an odd spam the other day. It claimed to be someone trying to get off google’s spam list, and pointed out that one of our hosted project’s trac was full of spam links. But a) it didn’t link to them and b) the author’s homepage was clearly spam. I guess it worked from a ‘get clicks’ perspective but wtf.

By: Alan Knowles

Alan Knowles — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:46:33 +0000

I noticed this a while back with my content, in the end I just added a line at the top of the rss feed of each article that is a link Pointing to the original page saying this article was originally published here…

If I was really smart I would probably keyword link spam in it, beat the spammers at thirty own game….

By: nobody

nobody — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:21:03 +0000

check you logfiles, maybe you found overlapping between the ip accessing to your rss and ip or iprange of the contentfarmers … just block them (or even better: deliver most useless content you can imagine)

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 16 May 2012 04:42:57 +0000

That (not underestimating the stupidity of spammers) is sage advice. I’m going to have to see what Flameeyes is doing with mod_security here too.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 16 May 2012 04:41:31 +0000

I’m guessing it’s the page rank, but hard to know…

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:55:47 +0000

You could go the route of trying to get content removed from sites, but ultimately that is going to end up in a game of wack-a-mole. I think you would be better off introducing technology to prevent the web scraping in the first place. I’m not an expert in this and don’t have specific suggestions. You will likely have to balance that with the ease of content availability to your legit readers (not unlike the captcha form that I am going to have to fill out to post this message). As to understanding the rationality of this activity and of the email messages, that is probably futile. One thing I learned from this business is to never underestimate the stupidity of spammers…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:14:06 +0000

If you can choke back the bad taste it’ll leave you with, DMCA notices work quite well to eliminate copies of your content. Send them to the hosting company, not just to the content farm.

By: Flameeyes

Flameeyes — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:38:18 +0000

I’d suggest you to just set up ModSecurity with proper antispam rules, I have my own set published at https://github.com/Flameeyes/modsec-flameeyes and it solves a lot of issues of scraping and spammers.

By: kevix

kevix — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:01:12 +0000

http://www.educause.edu/blog/crevier/blockdisplayofyourimagesonothe/164959
that might be one minor way.

By: Ingo

Ingo — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:31:21 +0000

Recently I found some of my blog post content (not design) copied on to me unknown websites. WIthout my permission or without even asking me.
Like yours, my blog has very modest traffic (about 8000 views per year).

By: Shae Erisson

Shae Erisson — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:27:43 +0000

Perhaps your blog has a high page rank, and the spammers want to exploit that?
Perhaps the spammers are hoping for a reply to see if your email is real and read?
I’m not sure what else might be going on here.