Within 2 hours after publishing my blog post on How to get Related Posts Plugin to work, an excerpt of the post is already published in two other blogs. Blog plagiarism is getting to be very common and I find that more and more posts that I published are being taken to be republished elsewhere. When I googled for solutions, I find that many other bloggers face the same predicament.
There are 2 stands on this:
- On the bright side- if a blog with higher readership took your content and link back to you, you get new visitors and exposure that you otherwise may not get on your own.
- On the down side- your content is stolen and advertisement are plastered all over their blogs.
You can choose action if the blog owner is making money off your content:
- Sending email to the blog owner to request to have the contents taken down.
- Notify the webhosting company where the site is hosted to inform them that a site they are hosting is stealing content from other websites.
- Notify the blog’s advertisers. From what I gather in discussions of the net- if the blog advertises via Adsense, the process can get difficult.
I remember years ago when I was relatively naïve about content plagiarism, I’ve visited a fitness blog that actually stole content from other websites. But at the point of time, I did not know that- I actually quoted his blog for providing good information. As the result of pingback, this owner got to know about it and actually dropped a comment at my blog to thank me.
Not long later when I revisited his blog, I noticed that the entire blog had gone and a notice was plastered on his blog by his webhosting company indicating that the blog had previously published stolen content. It was later, through my own personal experience of having my content stolen that I understand about content plagiarism.
I’ve thought about locating and notifying these culprits. But at the same time, I am also aware that as a part time blogger, I am wasting valuable resource hunting them down instead of generating quality content. There are just too many to combat.
Furthermore, I’ve been blogging long enough to know that it takes genuine passion to share and write in order to remain blogging day after day, year after year. Blogging is something that I’ve always done for free- it is only recently that I’ve included Adsense- to help sustain the blog when the looming hosting renewal brings in a reality that my finances can no longer afford. If I were to continue hosting the blog, somehow, I have to learn how to make the blog sustain itself.
Generating income via ‘black hat’ methods- for instance, using automated software to steal content and then republish as their own will not work in the long term. Furthermore, these black hats are competing with billions of other sites/blogs out there- when they find that earnings are just too little and not worth their time, they’ll just give up and move on to something else.
In the end, websites or blogs that still survive in the web are those that stood the test of time. We will want to visit and continue visiting websites/blogs that provide good value and quality, whom the authors we can relate to and/or look up to. And search engine tends to know this too- and will continue leading visitors to such sites.
Further good reads by experts on this topic:
1. Problogger- what to do when someone steals your content
2. What to do when someone steals your content
3. David Risley- how to deal with sites that steal your blog content
