In May 2003, a young reporter at the New York Times handed in his resignation to paper. The reporter, Jayson Blair, had already earned a reputation at the paper for inaccuracy, but it was the weeks prior that he had become the subject of plagiarism accusations that he had been unable to answer.
In the investigation that would follow, some 36 of his 73 stories would be deemed “suspect”, meaning they contained elements likely plagiarized from other sources. The scandal grew so large that, a mere month later, it claimed two more careers, those of two of the top editors at the paper, one of whom who was a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Though the purge was largely viewed as appropriate, it did little to repair the damage to the once-prestigious publication’s reputation. What was once a bastion of great American journalism had become mired in accusations of fraud and dishonesty, a problem they are still battling today.
The other day, I found a fascinating post on blogging programs that really held my interest, exploring why someone would stay with a specific program even when it made them unhappy. I noticed a reference to Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, but the link wasn’t to his name but on the word “of”.
I thought that was odd and noticed that other strange words were in links: her, the, in, about, and he. Very odd linking pattern.
A hover over the links found that they were links to porn sites.
Suspecting this was a splog, I wondered if the author had intended to write this interesting article and stuff it with the nasty porn links or if this was indeed a splog. I selected a block of text with unique phrasing and ran a search in Google for the phrase wrapped in quotes. Indeed, I found the original author and then informed them of the scraping and copyright violation as well as the nasty links.
Getting Scraped is a Compliment
Many feel that getting your blog content stolen and scraped by a splogger is a compliment. It means they care enough about your content to “spread the word”. Or they think that it won’t hurt them, but benefits them due to the trackbacks and link love.
This is crap. Loads of it. Piled very high.
It’s a load of garbage because few splogs give credit to the original author. In fact, they have programs which strip the HTML links and tags so they are free to insert their own with no good links getting in the way.
Google’s new PageRank algorithm now investigates and considers links and content in many ways. It’s about keyword matching and relative content linking.
If there is a credit link back to your blog, and the links within the blog post are not inline with the blog contents, on the blog and the linking blogs, the discrepancy is noticed and can score against you. If the content from two different sites match, and the links within don’t, it can score against you.
If you are worried about duplicate content, then be more worried. If the duplicated content is matched up with your blog, then your site may get scored low for such duplication. It isn’t just the duplication on your blog but the duplication of your content off your blog.
Content theft is on the rise and the problem is spreading to more and more bloggers.
Many blogs, especially those with spam-friendly keywords, are scraped from their very first post. Those who avoid that fate, sadly, seem to follow soon thereafter as their sites receive links and gain the attention of blog search engines and content-hungry spammers.
When it is all said and done, it is not a matter of if, but when, your new blog is plagiarized, either via an automated process or by a human looking to fill the pages of their own site.
However, detecting such plagiarism can be a daunting challenge. With the Internet as vast as it is and growing every second, finding plagiarized copies of your work can seem to be akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
Fortunately, the very tools that spammers and plagiarists rely on to benefit from your work make it easy to locate them. It is simply a matter of knowing how to use the tools that are available.
