There’s something rotten in the state of the blogosphere.
Like most neo-narcisists, I have a Google Alert going on my name, or more specifically, the name of my company. Every day, I get reports on posts I’ve done that mention “flyte,” or traffic reports involving people named “Flyte,” or updates on the Brideshead Revisited movie that may or not be made, or, more recently, seeing my work appear without my permission at other blogs.
These blogs have invariably scraped content from a post of mine, sometimes w/credit, sometimes w/o, and used the content w/o comment to sell Google Ads. Of course, anyone coming to the site will invariably click on one of those ads, because the scraped content is often incomplete and thus incoherent. For example:
Although there are several Web sites dedicated to organizing and promoting … To start, I?d recommend using a hosting service that specializes in Podcasts. … His podcast, flyte: Web strategies for small business, is available at …
Yeah, I’d be proud of that.
Each time I find content that’s been scraped selling Adwords I report it to Google. Here’s how:
- Click on the link that says “Ads by Goooooogle.”
- Scroll down the following page and click on “Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw.”
- Click on the “Also report a Violation?” link.
- Report to Google that this blog/site is scraping content from your blog (assuming they are.)
If it’s a Blogger blog you can also flag it for in appropriate content.
Unfortunately, I’m concerned that Google’s not concerned enough. After all, they make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads. While I like the people at Google, and I think they’re bright and they want to do the right thing, this may be a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop.
Recently, Search Engine Roundable reported that Google had a patent application named “Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system,” so maybe they’re taking it seriously.
However, until they do take it seriously bloggers need to be watching that their own content isn’t being scraped and Adwords advertisers should probably require that their ads only appear at Google, and not on 3rd party sites.
I’ve talked a few times about Google’s rather odd role on scraping and spam blogging on my site. They run the search engine that is the target of spam bloggers, they run the hosting service that most spam bloggers prefer, Blogger, and they run the ad network that generates most of the revenue.
In my personal experience, Google is very serious about stopping copyright infringement using the Adsense network, but not necessarily spam. Since most spammers now take such small portions as to not necessarily violate copyright, it falls back from the Adsense DMCA system and into the more generic Google Adsense TOS violations.
Sadly, the latter of the two seems to be in disarray. Overrun by spammers and bogged down by a strange disjunct between the Bloggers, Google and Adsense abuse teams. The right hand doesn’t seem to know what the left is doing. Getting a blogger account cut for spam does not always get the Adsense account cut and vice versa.
It’s a frustrating situation to say the least and I hope that this Google patent you link to might be the beginning of the end for the spam issue. I’ve been hoping they’ve had a secret plan to attack this. Maybe that hope is being fulfilled.
Regardless, a guy has to dream doesn’t he?
Anyway, thank you for the interesting article! I appreciate you drawing attention to this subject.
Comment by Jonathan Bailey — January 8, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
[…] Wer sein Inhalt auf einer Website entdeckt welche mit diesem Inhalt versucht Google-Adwords zu verkaufen, der hat Möglichkeit dagegen vorzugehen, falls ihn die Vorgehensweise stört. Wie das geht beschreibt Rick E. Bruner in Scraped Blog Content and Google Adwords. […]
Pingback by Mit fremden Federn Geld verdienen » Peruns Weblog - Webwork und Internet — January 14, 2007 @ 9:07 am
“Click on the link that says “Ads by Goooooogle.â€? ”
Funny and interesting. Google is weak against spam.
Comment by Martin Hamann — May 2, 2007 @ 6:14 pm