They say being copied is the best form of flattery. However, in the blogosphere, you do not want to be copied, believe me.
The first time I was copied was the most creepy of all. There was a person who took some of my personal blog posts and pretended they were hers. Now, that was spooky. I think that copying general works is plagiarizing, however copying personal words and conversations are simply creepy. She also copied some images and a couple of blog posts from other bloggers but she was soon found out and disappeared soon after that. Well, that was that.
Later on, I found out that my entire blog was being copied in its entirety, along with images and everything else on it. I was taught to put up a fake post with a silly image and so I did. I put up a post with a picture of people carrying a banner that says that the blog (url) was copying content and that blog picked up that blog post as well and it was published in that fake post was published on that blog as well. It disappeared soon after that. That was the end of that.
Now, from time to time, I realise my blog posts are being copied by spam blogs and there is not much I can do about it. However, the latest incident is a pain. My blog post was copied again. This time I can’t put up a fake post because this blog picks up the rss of several blogs and passes it off as its own. Then it earns advertising revenue from links and ads on its blog. I can’t put up a fake post because I don’t know which of my posts will be picked up. Unfortunately, it copied a sponsored post of mind and my post was rejected because of duplicate content! The advertiser thought that I was the one who had copied the post!
After I wrote to them, the middle man realised that the other blog may be a spam blog but the question is what to do? They have said that they will need to investigate, check with their manager etc before getting back to me. However, I decided that I have to be professional about it. I have offered to remove the advertiser links from that post, report the spam to google and then rewrite a new blog post for the advertiser. Such a lot of work! However, even though the amount is small, I feel that I must be professional even though I am only a small time occassional paid post writer. I will also write to the other bloggers whose posts have been copied and ask them to report the spam to google as well. What would you do if you were me?
I’ve noticed these copy cat blogs since the first month of blogging. Excerpts of my posts copied everytime I post something and they are earning Adsense (Bl@#dy H*LL I thought) And here I am with a legitimate blog, Adsense go and reject me. I think you do what you mentioned and hopefully with your complain to google something will be done to stop them from further copying. Also, by being professional like that I’m sure the advertisers will appreciate it and you preserve your integrity.
mom2kiddos. Oh dearie me! That is terribly annoying. Maybe that is why Adsense rejects you! Well, the next time you find an excerpt of your blog post, you can use this report spam form to report them to Google. FYI, the advertiser was very professional too. They decided to approve my original work because they said that it would not be fair to me to do extra work for something that was obviously not my fault. 🙂
Altho I’ve been blogging for a few years, I am not aware if my blog has been copied, not that i think my blog/posts are that good that people want to copy…how do you find out?
Anna, in this case my post was rejected by the advertiser who informed me. They had rejected my post based on the fact that it was not 100% genuine and had asked me to resubmit. I wrote back to inform them that my post was 100% unique and written by me and they gave me the other url. You see, sometimes the advertiser checks your submissions by making searches on specific keywords and their search turned up two identical post with identical dates. There is no way of knowing who copied who but in this case, it is obvious that the other blog is a spam blog. All the other posts were copied from other blogs as well. I did my own searches and showed the advertiser the urls of the other blogs which were being copied by this spam blog.
Sometimes, this blog also picks up copied posts as trackbacks. I click on those trackbacks and see my own post. There is another way you can check. That is by using Copyscape. I don’t do that because who has the time and besides there isn’t really much you can do anyway. However, you can try just for fun. Go to copyscape then key in the url of your blog or specific urls and see if it turns up anything. Hope you don’t get a nasty surprise. Haha.
Wow, this is new to me. I didn’t even know that this kind of thing exists. I mean, why would one copies a blog? Something new.. yeah, how did you find out?
Why would one copy a blog? To make money, that is why. To make money easily from something you didn’t write.
From what I noticed, that blog is stealing content from my blog as well as two other blogs. The stealing is automated so the person behind it does not even need to do anything. All that is required is to put up some links and ads and earn from those. Almost no effort required.
Here, let me show you an example. Here is my latest blog post and here is a copy of it. See how many ads and links the copied post has? The copier earns revenue from those links and ads.
BTW, I tried to post a comment on your blog but I couldn’t. Recently I have been having this problem with blogger. It either says my credentials could not be verified or it keeps on requesting for me to sign in to my Google Account over and over again. Have you been having this problem?
oh dear, yet again?!? perhaps you could leave a comment on the copycat’s post accusing them of being fakes?
as for not being able to comment on blogs…did you change any settings relating to “cookies” and “history”? I had that problem awhile ago when I changed the settings to “never remember history” so I just click on “remember history” then it was back to normal.