Having been around for two and a half years, this site; Cycling London, Urban Commuting by Bike, has gained some unwanted attention.
A few sites have taken to automated stealing of the original content, word for word. I spend the time creating, writing and editing the content, then they steal it instantly and publish it as their own.
It's quite disheartening, and Google don't have a grip on it yet. Which means that the bad sites often outrank the original source site, through underhand manipulation of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
If you have a blog or website, do visit this site: http://www.copyscape.com, enter your url, and the useful resource will instantly sniff around for any dodgy sites which may have nicked your content and published it as their own.
I'm not going to link to the offending sites, as this would only help their SEO status.
So the point is; I've turned off the RSS feed for Cycling London. If this was useful to you previously, please contact me. In the mean time, email updates are available from FeedBurner here, and on the right side-bar.
4 comments:
How interesting, and annoying. So far so good for me, I guess I haven't attracted enough attention and don't have interesting-enough content to plagiarize, nothing turned up in my search. Still, I may take a proactive approach and disable RSS feeds now while I'm thinking about it.
Were you able to get the offending sites to remove your content?
No, the kind of people that are going to make a site out of 100% stolen content(not only my site, but many others') are not reasonable people.
E-mail their ISP, you might be able to get them shutdown.
I think attacking this kind of thing is like flighting the tide..
Its not really your job to monitor this kind of thing, its googles, and they do get better all the time. If your content is original then the SERPs will settle in the end.
A quote from somewhere I can't remember.. "Its when they stop copying your work.. thats when you should start to worry" :)
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