stopping spam blogs

The other day I noticed (thanks Martin!) that a spam blog was taking my RSS feed and republishing content from cybersoc.com elsewhere [see technorati's tracking of the links]. Spam blogs basically take content from RSS feeds, republish it, then reap the google adsense rewords, flog ringtones, make money on pay-per click to porn or dating sites, etc.

So what can you do to stop them?

First point of call, if they are displaying google ads, is to report a terms of service violation to the Adsense programme. Once the ads are gone, there's little reason for the sites to continue.

Another step you can take is to contact the blogging service used by the spam bloggers and report a terms of service violation there. I've provided direct links for making reports to WordPress, Typepad and Blogger.

You might also try to find out who owns the domain they are using and what ISP they are using by searching a whois database. It's likely you'll find lots of misinformation but you might just get lucky and find something useful. In my case, I can see that the name was registered by estdomains (probably unwittingly) and have reported abuse (inaccurate whois information - estdomains won't accept complaints about spam blogs) to them.

Lorelle on WordPress also has some advice on beating the spam blogs and some valuable insights into dealing with all forms of content theft.

I'll let you know what affect, if any, these steps have in the coming days...

Update: Using a reverse IP tool I've found that the site appears to be hosted by a hosting provider in Russia and the same server hosts at least 25 other spam blogs. I'm guessing they won't be a much help.

Comments

[Lorelle]

Don't give up because it's in Russia, or anywhere else in the world. Keep trying. The next step, if first contact fails, is to contact Google and Adsense, and whoever advertises there, as you mentioned. Help to take away their income and they will notice. ;-)

Good luck and keep us up to date on what happens and how you handled this.

[Jonathan Bailey]

Also, don't forget that sometimes sites that appear to be hosted in Russia are actually hosted by a Russian company leasing servers in America. At that point, you can use the DMCA against the American host and get the content removed. I've done this several times myself.

[Deirdre Molloy]

Robin, this is a good round up of useful tips. I've had a few problems myself but not much time to explore solutions. Thanks!

[RobinH]

Thanks for the comments everyone. I haven't heard back from google adsense other than the standard "thanks for your email, due to privacy issues we can't tell you what action we take..."

Esthost, which hosts the domain name, has responded to my complaint that the ICANN domain registration information is obviously incorrect:

--- quote ---
Hello,

thank you for reporting the problem, we will contact the owner of this domain name and if the data will not be changed in 15 days as rules of
ICANN, we will suspend this domain name.

Regards,
Abuse Manager

[Graham]

A month or so ago I noticed one site that kept coming up in my technorati keywords RSS feed that monitors chatter around my blog. It's a spamblog, no original content, no comments box, just RSS feeds of a bunch of thematically related blogs. However, each post does have a link back to the original blog.

After reading yr. post yesterday, I decided to do something about. The blogger runs advertsing. I emailed Adsense, Amazon Associates, the 'blogger', the registrar company and the hosting company. Today I can't access the site, I need a password, so I guess the blogger got the willies. However the hosting company said,

"Unfortunately, I\'m afraid that we don\'t have any rules specifically against this sort of thing (technically, they are just hosting a site on our servers - Google is indexing the site on their own volition). However, if someone is simply copying your site content and using it as their own, you may want to consider filing a formal DMCA Notification with us. At that point, we could remove access to the content in question and potentially disable the account."

Now, because the blogger is linking back to the original post is this officially a spamblog? Although there is no original content on the blog, is the link enough to show that he is not passing the content off as his own? Whatever he is, or was, earning money on the back of bloggers from an automated feed. And that's not cool.