It is so frustrating – a very similar thing happened 2 weeks ago on my site by 2 articles being pasted together and posted as an article that was scraped innumerable times and a No1 ranking for a particular pastime in abruzzo disappearing before my eyes.

Sadly/thankfully the lazy company owner hadn’t read what she had paid a very poor blogging service for, so all references to the locations in abruzzo were way off target and her company ended up looking indirectly ridiculous for all those that knew the local areas she was describing – but that is the problem we don’t write for those that know the areas already!

I appealed directly to her and she has managed to get the blogging service to withdraw all but 2 of them from various sites . I also wrote to Google’s DMCA but nothing back yet..

#1 is yousaytoo.com/i-m-an-idiot-and-a-thief-for-publishing-this/148733

Entire article taken, no link to ALTB (even the body link is removed)

#2 Kay’s Not Delia blog entry mentioned above

#3 A link from this blog’s Twitter account

#4 exetertraveljournal.blogspot.com/2009/11/winter-wonderland.html

No apparent mention of the phrase on both the current and cached copies (?!)

#5 cityspur.com/tag/luxury-travel/ (links through to cityspur.com/2009/12/17/a-luxury-travel-blog-%C2%BB-special-feature-gwel-an-mor-cornwall-uk/ )

It’s at least just an extract and does link through to ALTB

#6 incityhotels.com

No apparent mention of the article now and no cached copy but it looks to be a site that engages in blog scraping.

#7 traveldealsreview.net/travel-vacations/video-britains-best-views-roseberry-topping-yorkshire.html (with link through to traveldealsreview.net/travel-vacations/i’m-an-idiot-and-a-thief-for-publishing-this.html )

Entire content reproduced wtih body link to ALTB removed. There is at least a link at the end of the article (although not underlined and by then the entire thing has already been read so not much point in clicking anyhow…)

#8 definitivecaribbean.blogspot.com/2009/03/barbados-sea-turtle-project.html#uds-search-results

No apparent mention of the article and nothing in the cache.

#9 29travels.com/travelfeeds/

No objection to this as it’s merely linking to ALTB with the title as anchor text.

#10 aluxurytravelblog.com/…/special-feature-gwel-an-mor-cornwall-uk/

Hurrah! We finally get a mention! Even if it is linking to completely the wrong post (the entry that came after this entry)

#11 jordy.pixnet.net/blog/archives/20091115 – Chinese site

#12 a forum that happens to mention the same phrase but is unrelated

#13 travelerscompany.com that links to travelerscompany.com/i’m-an-idiot-and-a-thief-for-publishing-this where the whole article has been copied but no link to the source provided (other than the link I sneaked into the body)

So… what should we make of all this? Well, one thing for sure is that Google doesn’t seem to be very good at handling it. There’s a number of sites there that do link to ALTB and yet the vast majority rank above. Surely that’s not right.

Paul

In the meantime, here’s another idiot (and thief) for you:

travelerscompany.com/i%E2%80%99m-an-idiot-and-a-thief-for-publishing-this

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=dmca_complaint

It has automatically stripped out the link within the body of the post, and I notice the word ‘travel’ within ‘A Luxury Travel Blog’ links to their own site.

They do at least acknowledge the source of the entry at the end of their post (which is better than some) but the link is not underlined, so it’s not obvious. And why would anyone click through when the entire text has already been duplicated?

Tsk…

Kay runs the fantastic ‘Not Delia’ blog, by the way.

She’s joined in on the effort with this entry:

http://www.notdelia.co.uk/im-an-idiot-and-a-thief-for-publishing-this/

On a similar subject, a friend of mine found a lot of his images had been stolen and hot-linked to. He changed the URLs of the images for his own pages and replaced the hot-linked ones with a new image saying “I am a thief and I stole this image from xyz.com”.

But back to the content theft thing, there are so many scraper sites out there that as soon as you publish anything you can find it on loads of other sites.

I’ll do anything I can to move this campaign forward with you.

For instance, try this search:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22text+on+a+site+that+is+not+A+Luxury+Travel+Blog%22