Splogs Just Won’t Stop Hitting Me!
Posted by Mike | Filed under Blogging, Link Building, SEOIt’s All About Splogs… Again.
Do you guys remember my post about splogs? What about my post about the plagiarist who apparently subscribed to my feed and copied my posts? Well… after I reported his blog to Google and certain anti-splog sites, I ignored him and continued doing my business. Since all the posts that he copied had the following text, I didn’t worry about certain penalties from search engines.
“Copyright © 2007 The WWW Observer. If you’re not reading this via your feed reader, the site you’re currently on is owned by a plagiarist who does nothing but copy others’ articles.”
After a few weeks, I noticed that my blog’s dashboard displayed lots incoming links which have the titles of my posts. I was surprised to see that there are at least five (5) splogs scraping my content! 
Wait… is this something that will benefit my blog? Or is it just something which will pull my rankings down?
9 out of 10 incoming links are from splogs!
I’m SO Annoyed!
Everyone (well, at least everyone that I know) hates splogs. They’re good-for-nothing content scrapers which ruin a blog’s perfect no duplicate content record! Now that I’ve expressed my feelings about those… argh… content scrapers, let’s talk about the potential damage and benefit that splogs can bring.
Something Good or Something Bad?
Because I’ve got thousands of links just from splogs, my backlink count obviously went up. As we all know, more backlinks mean better search engine rankings, but if those links come with duplicate content (not all splogs post my copyright notice), will my blog be penalized? I’d like to know your thoughts. Come on, press that comment button!
Those splogs probably use the “Wordpress Rewriter” plugin.However,I’m sure google won’t put them in front of you in google.
Great job with this blog and with what you’re dooing
Hey, thanks for dropping by Mihai. Thanks for the nice comment too.
Most splogs use the WP-autoblog plugin. This plugin came under scrutiny and the author decided to (permanently) shutter it. Well, at least he gave a link to a page for writing DMCA notices.
*The plugin author’s comments can be found here.
I can’t say with 100% certainty, but I wouldn’t worry too much about getting docked for duplicate content. 2 reasons:
1)Your content was there first. I’m sure Google takes that into account.
2)You almost certainly have a higher PR than the sploggers. I’ve seen/heard on multiple places that Google gives the benefit to the site with the higher page rank.
Those are my thoughts on it.