My last post, on Patrick Stewart, had attracted much more attention than usual, I have had a couple of random pingbacks, which I don’t normally get. One of them is just a link aggregator, but the other one has taken all of my copy and put it on their blog, with just a link at the bottom back to my site.
I am not happy about this, but I don’t really know what I can do, other than leave a comment at the end of their post.
Do any of you have experience of this and what happened?
I’ve had that happen to me before Jen and it annoys the hell out of me.
I think it’s an unscrupulous SEO tactic. Even if you had a route to complain they’d probably just ignore you. I bet it’s an automated algorithm that looks for certain keywords and writing style. If you look at the bloggers’ other posts you’ll likely see other stolen posts.
From an SEO point of view, the pingback on your post make’s their overall site seem more relevenat to search engines… and vice versa. Their link to you, makes your site seem more relevant.
You’re in the position of power though – you can reject the pingback and still benefit SEO wise.
I appreciate that you’re not wanting to promote your blog in that way but I’ve found it interesting to look into.
You can flag the pingback as spam which will eventually have the culprit flagged as a spammer if enough people do it but for now I’d settle for being flattered that your post was seen as good enough to nick.
I agree I think it is an unscrupulous SEO tactic, however I don’t get what they are advertising, unless it is just a linking site, which I suppose must benefit someone somewhere.
It has just happened again, I guess Patrick Stewart is a much more popular keyword than some of my more esoteric subjects!!
that’s why i write my “article copyrighted by” thingy w my blogspot address at the end. i figure a lot of these bots just copy the entire blog, so if the copyright thing doesn’t dissuade them, it will at least link back to my original post (hopefully).
and otherwise, i try to ignore it. i tried commenting and emailing them- to no result as far as i can see.
I don’t think the article copyrighted thing makes a difference. As Armaitus says, I suspect it is a SEO thing. I have marked them all as spam anyway!Gits the lot of them!