After taking a look recently at the Google Blog Search Tool, I came across a frightening trend…auto-blogging plagiarism.  For those not familiar with the process, programs exists that will search out existing blogs for certain types of content (sports, finance, etc.) and when it locates it, grabs a paragraph or two and adds it to its own blog, with no reference to the original source.  Less sophisticated but also effective, are blog-scrapers which seeks out posts and allow the user to modify the content as needed. For examples of this, we do a search on the keywords  need-content-blog. You will see three or four posts that come up with the results, the original post posted here at the Free SEO Friendly Blog, as well as three additional links.  The one posting is merely two different sentences ripped directly from the posting. Another one references the stolen blurbs and references the first act of plagiarism as the source.  The other displays a broken quote and links directly to the original source.  Looking in my comments section for this post, I see a reference to a posting that was merely a copy of my content (although the site now appears to be down).

 The other crummy part about this, is that the plagiarized posting gets a higher rank in Google’s results as it had been linked by another site.

Looking for answers, I came across websites offering the auto-blogging software as a method of providing “original content” for your site, as it would grab postings in other languages and translate it using online translation tools. Well, if this is the software they used, it obviously didn’t do its job very well.

Now don’t get me wrong, as a blogger, you do want people to link to your articles, syndicate your feeds via rss, and read what you have to say, but taking your content and not giving you credit is downright criminal. 

How do we combat against these content-thieves?  No one solution is guaranteed.  Wordpress (the software we use) offers different plug-ins which will allow everything from banning certain users access to the blog, to limiting what they see.

Will provide more information as we come across it.