Though it wasn’t what Lorelle meant to say, it is worth accenting. I don’t think there is much point in watching your keywords because there isn’t much you can do as you never know which keywords the spammers will target.

Case in point. Say I wrote the sentence:

“Increased competition from legitimate bloggers and search engines will result in enhancements in spam techniques.”

Seems innocent enough, but a few pharma spammers will see the word “enhancements and latch on to the post.

Ok, rewrite the last part to read as follows:

“…will result in improved performance in spamming techniques.”

Once again, same problem though now with “improved performance”. Ok, so we try again, change the direction of the sentence.

“will result in increased interest in developing new spamming techniques.”

Same boat, this time real estate spammers will hit on “increased interest” and so the loop goes on.

Not only would you be denying your readers your true voice, but I can promise you that you will never be able to write your way out of the spammer’s traps. There are so many kinds of spammers seeking so many keywords it isn’t possible.

Though it would be a fun writing assignment to try. Maybe I just came up with a great way to torment my readers :)

Good point. I should have been more specific in my mention of “careful”. Watch trackbacks closer to ensure you catch the scrapers and splogs and remove them from your comments panel, and take action if necessary to help put an end to them.

Thanks for catching me on that, Ian!

I have to take care in the words I choose now for the very reason Jonathan mentions. Within minutes of publishing Give Credit When Credit is Due: Skip The Middle Man, three scraper trackbacks hit from mortgage, banking, and credit card splogs. The article is about giving credit to the source of the quoted post, not whoever pointed you to the source. Nothing to do with finance.

Don’t forget, these people are making money. Lots of money. All their time and money goes into figuring out how to do this better and faster. There are a couple people we can “thank” for originally creating auto-scraping programs for WordPress blogs, but their excuse is that “someone would do this so why not me first” and they continue to get attention, links, and money for their actions.

Sure, evil blooms where people gather. It’s just heartbreaking that evil is allowed to flourish in what should be a bastion of freedom and goodwill.

As a marketer I have to agree. Choice is good, too much choice is bad. Look at Linux for proof of that.

Still, I don’t know if that is the problem here or not. I’m really unsure what angle you’re coming at this from or choice you are referring to? Choice in Web sites? That could be part of it at least.

Sue:

Why are they scraping you?

Well, it’s hard to add on Lorelle here, but I can take a stab.

The first problem is that some spammers seem to be grabbing just about everything that comes down the pipe. When you ping your blog out with every new entry, it goes to services that spammers and good guys alike can read and update from. Many pull from those sources and get incredible amounts of content.

The second is that many spammers target keywords and since it doesn’t matter if the keyword is the center of your article, you can get picked up on some strange sites. Case in point, I had a woman who operated a blog focused on helping parents protecting their children that found her content being used on a spam blog promoting teen porn. Why? Because she happened to mention the two words in the same piece when talking about the dangers faced by runaways. It was horrible and disgusting, but is also the nature of this automated software.

I’ve done tests on my own and found that scraping starts from the very first post, literally. It’s frightening stuff. It doesn’t matter how big or small you are, it’s just a matter of if your content is available.

The only thing the PageRank hike might have changed is that it put you on spam “short lists”, lists that spammers keep of active blogs that have a good reputation. These are preferred targets because they create a reliable content stream. However, it isn’t a matter of big or small, just how much output you have.

The bottom line is that spammers want content and they don’t care who they get it from.

Sad, but true.

Lorelle:

Thank you for the high praise and for your efforts as well. You’ve done as much as I in this field!

It’s amazing how often I hear people say this same thing. Honestly, do you think that any scraper who grabs thousands of blog contents every day even pays attention to who they are grabbing?

I’ve found that they go after “small” bloggers as they are the ones less willing to “fight back”. It may or may not have anything to do with PageRank. It could do with keywords you use on your blog that brought them into their sights. It could be a lot of things, which I hope Jonathan can enlighten us with, but don’t think you are special because you’ve been scraped.

EVERYONE is being scraped or has the potential to be scraped. It’s a sick world out there. Thank goodness we have people like Jonathan Bailey fighting for our rights and educating us.

But at least we now have some money and corporations backing the good guys. It’s a slight improvement…