Google Alerts can be a quick way of spotting people spamming with your content
Sadly, the web is full of people ripping off other peoples’ content in order to spam the search engines. They harvest content from your website, and post it on their own site to draw traffic to it. There are a number of reasons for this but the most common is to try and create ad revenue.
The result is that eventually there will be more sites containing cobbled together bullshit than sites containing real content written for real readers – if there isn’t already.
There’s very little you can do when someone (or some ‘bot’) steals your content. You can find out about it, however, by using Google Alerts. This free Google service lets you set up daily alerts on any terms you wish and get email summaries when those terms are posted online. I have a Google alert running for ‘mukaumedia’ resulting in the following email:
Knowing that this wasn’t a post I’d made, I clicked on the link.
It took me to a Windows Live blog featuring a badly-rewritten version of some shownotes for our podcast dealing with online reputation management (including our voicemail line number and email address!)
What did I do? I reported abuse with Windows Live. I then created an account and replied to their blog.
And I blogged here using the same keywords they’ve posted with (‘online repute direction’) so that this post will come up next to theirs in the unlikely event that anyone ever searches for that phrase in Google.
Oh, and used All In One SEO pack in WordPress to create a summary for this post that says “Hey, that spammer at Windows Live stole my content! Look at this. Find out what YOU can do when someone steals your content for blog spam” 
Recent Comments