If you're a blogger or a reviewer, you may just be a victim also.
Jackie from Literary Escapism emailed me and a few other book bloggers that the blog A Books Blog is yet another one of these sites that will duplicate a blog post.
In A Books Blog About section: Find the best books blog content from all over the Internet in one place at ABooksBlog.com! ABooksBlog.com, drives traffic to bloggers who write about books.Submit your feed and we will syndicate your blog posts on our growing books blog portal. All your links will be preserved in your posts as well as a link back to your original post and full attribution.
A Books Blog, as well as others like it, are making money off what you have posted on your own blog because of advertising on their site. And you don't get a cut of it. Plus, they don't ask your permission before posting.
Now some may have submitted their posts there to bring traffic to their blog, but by posting at A Book Blog, they're making money off of you. Why should they make revenue off your original content when you don't? It's one thing to post a snippet, but posting the entire blog post word for word doesn't sit right with me.
Two such sites that are also guilty of slapping up blog posts not their own are BookBlips and Horror Blips.
I typed in my blog name and my on-line handle at Book Blips and a whole slew of posts that I have written from my blog and elsewhere came up. I never submitted my posts to them.
Angela who runs Dark Faerie Tales recommends three sites to use where you can track your blogs that are copying your blog content:
Copy Gator: http://www.copygator.com/
Fair Share: http://www.copygator.com/
Plagium: http://www.plagium.com/index.cfm?mode=text
If anyone wants to leave some other blog scrapping sites in the comments, I will make a list and will post on my sidebar that says: Blogger Beware Sites.
10 comments:
Wow, I had no idea. I've had people tell me that they've linked to one of my posts, but I did once discover that someone had cut and pasted the whole thing, although they did credit my site. I have a widget that says that all my content is copyrighted, but I guess people ignore that.
Ugh! Complete and total douchebaggery! These people have no morals.
I'm not sure if I should be flattered or offended I couldn't find my name on the site. That's pretty low. If people agree to post their stuff there fine, but to just snatch it is nasty. I know some don't even give original credit either which is even worse.
Q - is it the whole post being taken or just like 50-100 words? Because if the latter it's not stealing it's technically a aggregator website which Google completely allows.
Even if your blog feed is a complete feed instead of a partial the aggregator website should have been set up to only post the first 50-100 words.
An aggregator site is kind of like Google Reader but public. Again though, they shouldn't have the full post.
I used to run an aggregator site but then the coding got screwed up, stole people's full posts despite the internal settings and links out redirected in, it was a mess. Neither I and a code savvy friend couldn't fix it so I took it down.
The reason for doing it was for etiquette purposes. When an aggregator site takes the whole post it's not good and it's not nice because as you have said it's ripping others content.
Aggregator sites should however graciously remove you upon request. It doesn't need to be nasty, just explain firmly and politely that either a) you want to be taken entirely off or b) you'd prefer it if they would change the way it was taken so it was an excerpt (50-100 words).
Aggregator sites are good for backlinks if they are indeed excerpt based.
Keira: when you click on the subject header, it takes you to another page on the site.
The fact that some of these sites have advertising and making money on every click, is wrong.
email them, tell them to remove your content, I gave A Books Blog seven days and they had it done the next day
It happens often and is nothing new. Put your blog name in a google alert and you will see them... or check your track backs... some of them don't even pretend to be 'book sites' and are just spammers like sites with ads.
IIRC Dear Author did a post on it a while back along with a sample email to send. But I could be wrong.
Woo! I checked and they didn't have anything on me. But dayum! Stealing blog entries? That's just low.
*shakes head*
I can understand a genuine mistake (like as Keira described), but not blatently stealing entire posts. But I guess there are always going to be (although I wish there weren't) people who will let others do the work and profit from it...
Why can't these sites ask first? I don't get it.
Put that copygator on my site to remember to keep an eye on things cos yes blips sure had stuff from me
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