Maybe this isn’t that new, but it’s fairly new to me.
I’ve been getting trackbacks from these spammer blogs that scrape a piece of my blog and post it along with a link to my original post. It seems clear that they’re run by bots because of the un-natural way in which they select text to post.
here’s an example of one such spam bot blog
EDIT: Here’s another Spam-Bot-Blog
It’s weird and annoying. I wonder if this is working for them. Do they make money with AdSense clicks? Do they come up in search results for the topics they are centered on?
This kind of gaming the system is just… Not cool!
It’s like leaving garbage on the ground at the beach. It’s an abuse of one of our shared resources, the Web.
idetrorce, king of blog comment spam? « Andrew A. Peterson and Ramping Up wrote on December 15th, 2007 5:31 pm :
[...] 15, 2007 Got a comment from idetrorce on my post about robot blogs: “very interesting, but I don’t agree with you [...]
Forrest wrote on December 30th, 2007 11:42 am :
I don’t think this is a zombie or botnet issue … there just doesn’t need to be much distributed computing going on to achieve this splog ( spam blog ) thing. I’ve been having the same experience, where once I click publish there are ten copies of my post on what seem to be robo-blogs. This is most of the reason I use partial rss feeds.
In my case, the scrapers aren’t doing a very good job. They seem to do it to get content to feed the search engines, probably to drive traffic at adsense or other affiliate programs. Luckily, the ones that grab my feed tend to ‘make’ thousands of posts a month, so they don’t wind up being crawled in the first place. I know other people who’ve fared much worse, though, so I seem to be lucky.
In the opening of every post – at least before you break it with the ‘more’ function – put a fully qualified link ( ie one starting with http:// ) back to your blog. Assuming the scraper doesn’t remove this, it (1) gives you a low quality link, which may help with traffic, and (2) alerts Google to the original source of the content.
“wrote an Intersting post today,” SEO, Evil Robots and One Sad Outcome of Non-Semantics in Spam-Control/Search « Andrew A. Peterson wrote on April 7th, 2008 2:49 pm :
[...] 7, 2008 I’ve mentioned before how increasingly the ‘Live Web’ or ‘Blogosphere’ (or whatever you [...]
Edmonton Dodge wrote on July 3rd, 2011 2:03 pm :
I’m glad you came out with this observation because I had similar experience where our articles are supposedly syndicated but partially and minus the source links. Most “scraping” of this kind would appear when there are special international events, either boxing, UFC, or concerts. Thanks for sharing.
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This is somewhat of a lengthy article, but I found it incredibly intriguing when I first read it some years ago:
http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
It’s about “zombies” – everyday computers that have been compromised in some way and run simple, hidden programs in the background, which connect to a central communications service (like IRC) and wait for the signal from an Operator to attack another computer.
I’m convinced that many of the comment/form spam we see today is based on somewhat the same premise; zombie computers with simple programming seek out forms to plant links into. This kind of bot-like link planting has already happened with FOAFr and continues to infrequently happen on another site I’ve worked on.
It’s annoying to me as well, but I find it fascinating and wonder if there’s a clever way to disrupt this network of zombie spam bots, if in fact that is how it’s run.