fracas

I’m tired of blog scrapers and their splogs are a blight upon the internet.

So is Ian
So is Lorelle
So is Jonathan

Aren’t you?

This morning, the first task I had was to have to go to yet another splog and leave the first step in the process of doing something about having my content stolen and posted on crappy spam blogs (splogs) so that some scraping (fancy name for a thief) suckhole who isn’t smart enough to write their own content thinks they can use mine to provide content on their ad-filled blog. In other words, they want to make money off of ads and click-throughs, but they don’t want to write the content that will draw the traffic to click those ads that make money for them. They want to make money off of the rest of us.

Kind of like the asswipe who breaks into your house, steals your electronics and then pawns them for cash. Yeah, that’s right you splogging suckhole, you aren’t any better than the common thief who steals televisions and dvd players from houses.

I have a bit of a series of posts that will be coming up in this area. The funniest, will no doubt be the screen caps I took of the splog that (because these thefts are automatic, taken from feeds or by bots) scraped a previous post I wrote condemning their actions. So indeed, on this splog, sits a post condemning themself. It’s poetic justice. I may leave that one just for entertainment value.

However, I’ve decided to collect names of bloggers who are tired of this. Another petition of sorts. I’d like to collect enough names to attract some regular old fashioned publicity. Aside from bringing awareness to honest bloggers, it will send a clear message to the scrapers, that we’re on the offensive and their posteriors will be ours.

It can be done.

Help fracas get this out there. There are manyof us who know what blog scraping is, who take steps to deal with these events and do our part, but there are still too many bloggers who don’t know what it is and think they can’t do anything about it. Some, even think that a few extra links to their site might actually be a good thing, so they don’t do anything about it at all. They couldn’t be more wrong. According to this Wikipedia page on scraper sites,

“Scrapers tend to be associated with link farms and are sometimes perceived as the same thing, when multiple scrapers link to the same target site. A frequent target victim site might be accused of link-farm participation, due to the artificial pattern of incoming links to a victim website, linked from multiple scraper sites.”

So by being a repeat victim, your own site could actually suffer loss of pagerank and loss of google indexing because you could be labeled as a blog of ill-repute yourself.

Of course, please don’t just believe me, or if you’re like me, you tend to take Wikipedia results with a grain of salt unless you confirm them somewhere else. You’re free to confirm what you just read at this Googlerankings.com page. Or heck.. why not just believe Lorelle. She left that advice in response to that previous post I talked about.

Are you angry yet? For taking time to create your own content, for putting effort into your blog, some thief has the power to sully your blog with the reputation of a link-farm. Now are you angry enough to want to do something?

Help the cause then.

Please inform your blog readers about my campaign. Write a post, and link to this post so they can read the explanation and then follow through to join the petition. Encourage others to also link to this post and sign the petition.

I’ve decided the most fitting name for a group against these thiefs is one that describes our intentions as well as what we think of the thiefs. Please join:

UASS (United Against Splogs & Scrapers)

Text link: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/uass-united-against-splogs-scrapers