Actively Monitor Splogs

Quite a number of splogging has been going around here, notably “photocopying” blog entries from here, PTB, and The Ca t. It’s one of the dark realities of the internet (since it’s easy to do so).

The case of The Ca t getting an exact replica of her own blog somewhere else is not un-usual anymore. I have seen maybe over a dozen other splogs lifting my RSS feeds and re-publishing it. However, since my feeds are configured to send out excerpts , the splog can only copy a couple fo sentence at a time.

I actually don’t mind them much. I feel that I’d only waste my time chasing after them and trying to shut down their site. What I would do is report them to Google AdSense (if they have one). To do this, just click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link on one of their ads and you will be taken to a landing page where you can send a report that the publisher is lifting your content and violates the AdSense TOS. That’s it. I have great faith in the AdSense team that they will do their job.

The more challenging effort here actually is identifying those who are re-publishing my RSS feeds. Technorati has a good filtering system so them splogs don’t pollute their search database, which is good actually, but that means you’re really lucky if you can spot half of them from there.

Here comes Google Blogsearch. Everyone know that Googles’ search performance on that arena is inversely proportional to Google’s web search. That means all splogs (esp. the ones coming from BlogSpot) are eventually indexed and will show up in the search. Still a little tricky though and a bit tedious if you do raw searches for them splogs.

Enter the Firefox “Blogger Web Comments” extension. Once installed in your Firefox browser, each and every page you visit will show a list of blog comments that links to that specific page/site. And since most of them splogs link back to you, you’ll be able to catch them from here — and that should only take a couple of seconds a day. Works for me.