My Blog post has been stolen

[Toddxxx]

Today someone left a coment on my blog, when I followed their link I got this:
http://bouquet.homegoodsstores.info/2011/02/15/roses-for-valentines-day/

My blog post is here:
http://www.hangingbasketflorist.com/blog/2011/02/roses-valentines-day/

Basically they have copied my blog (including the image), removed the links to my website and changed a few words. They did link to my blog with this "This article is revised from Roses for Valentine’s Day."

It also had the following comment (the second comment is mine, "waiting for aproval"):

• 
  admin says:
  February 15, 2011 at 2:45 pm
  Purchase fresh flowers to our sweethearts while poisoning by farmers and their families is so yesterday.
  Reply
  
• 
  Rockingham Florist says:
  Your comment is awaiting moderation.
  February 15, 2011 at 6:39 pm
  1. No farmers or their families are poisoned by the roses I sell, what an odd thing to say. All our roses are locally grown near Rockingham, Australia and are ethically farmed.
  2. When you say “revised from”, what you mean is “largely stolen from”
  3. The image is used is copywrighted Interflora Australia property. Do you have permission to use it?
  Reply
  

Has this happened to any of you? There are other posts on their blog, I assume they've done the same sort of thing there.

I also recently discovered a photo of a gift basket had been taken from my blog and used on other websites - looks like the sort of sites that exist solely to make money from AdSense. Learnt my lesson with that - I need to watermark my images, now that my photography is improving and I've got something worth stealing, but not much I can do about the text. (and yes, I can't spell copyright)

 

[sales@rosegarden]

You need to contact the company that you bought your domain from. Looks like someone hacked your site. Definitely take care of this pronto!

 

[bootcampguy]

That ticks me off. I've been using phrases and writting in my newsletter and blog, to find alot of the same information "word for word" on one professionals website and in one of the "floral" magazines. It really ticks me off to set that soemone took your hard work and effort and copied. At least take the time to change the photo and wording..................

 

[theRKF]

Sadly, this is ridiculously common. There are scripts you can buy for < $100 that build dozens of WordPress web sites, then go out and scrape data from other sites, YouTube & Flickr to "write" blog posts.

These sites are used for link building, AdSense and affiliate marketing, and search manipulation.

You can report the theft of the content to Google, and they may remove the page from their index - if the page is indexed with any authority.

 

[concord]

I saw my own writing word for word on the new web site of a Flowerchat member. I mentioned it to the offender in a post but never heard a word. My blogs isn't interesting enough to steal though so I guess that's safe from theft!

 

[sales@rosegarden]

Are people seriously not original enough to write their own crap! Goodness that makes me mad. If someone stole my writing I would be pissed! I used to write a lot but over the years it has become more and more difficult for me to do what I consider to be a great job at writing. I really have to put a lot of work into my writing, so if someone stole it I would really have to take some sort of action! I don't like a thief and I certainly can't stand plagiarism!

 

[Toddxxx]

Are people seriously not original enough to write their own crap! Goodness that makes me mad. If someone stole my writing I would be pissed! I used to write a lot but over the years it has become more and more difficult for me to do what I consider to be a great job at writing. I really have to put a lot of work into my writing, so if someone stole it I would really have to take some sort of action! I don't like a thief and I certainly can't stand plagiarism!

Yeah that's the rub. If you're not a writer it takes a lot of time & effort to write a blog post - this took me a few hours on my morning off, time I could've spent with my baby girl. Dang time thieves.

It's not even like it was very good!

 

[Toddxxx]

Timely. Seems Google is about to combat this sort of thing

http://mashable.com/2011/02/25/google-content-farms/

 

[anytimeflowers]

Wow, thanks for the find, Todd!

I drilled a little deeper and found this:

Google's Plan to Combat Search Spam

Excerpted from above.

Google’s new classifier is designed to detect spam on individual web pages by identifying spammy words and phrases. Cutts says that the company has also improved its ability to detect hacked sites and is testing new changes, including one that penalizes websites for copying the content of others without having original content of its own.

Now I'm REALLY wondering exactly what words and phrases are considered "spammy". Don't want to get caught up in that, as far as I have been able to tell, a Google penalty means your site can't be "found" for months.

It also appears that the companies who specialize in writing blog posts for busy people are going to get penalized or removed.

Wow. On the whole, it sounds really good to me. I honestly don't think that my site or blog would be considered spammy because I really don't see so much traffic but those who are really good at knowing what tricks to use could be caught up in it even when they are totally above board.

I can't help but notice that they don't plan to stop the sponsored ads from appearing EVERYWHERE. I guess that does not compute in their equation for good content.

 

[CHR]

Google's new filter should help rid SERPs of content thieves but we'll have to wait a bit to see if it really works.

Unfortunately, lots of content gets copied without attribution. Our biggest issue is images. Had to threaten a 'real florist' last month with a DMCA takedown since they stole 8 of our product images - and the texts - and were using them in the 'Our Unique Designs' section of their website.

One dOG submitted some of our unique photos to Google Shopping as their exclusive products. Idiots.

These kinds of businesses are bottom feeders and have no problem swiping anything as long as they can make a buck. The infuriating part is that they suck up valuable time when we have to expend effort to get them to pull down the stolen goods.

 

[theRKF]

Content farms are a little different than what happened to Todd, which is called being "scraped". A scraper is a script that searches out existing relevant content and either copies it directly or throws it into another script that does some word replacement or blends it with other scraped content to create mathematically unique text.

A content farm works like this: Hire really cheap authors to write short articles or guides on thousands of topics -> place ads on the content knowing that -> user arrives via search, with intent that isn't met by the content ... so the user clicks on an ad that looks like it might better satisfy the user's intent.

The best part? Google provides the ads via AdSense, and profits on the clicks. Hence their long delay in dealing with the situation.

 

[CHR]

Part of the G's recent algo tweeks were supposed to hit scrapers, per Danny Sullivan:

The “Scraper Update”

About a week after Google’s post, Cutts confirmed that an algorithm change targeting “scraper” sites had gone live:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.​

“Scraper” sites are those widely defined as not having original content but instead pulling content in from other sources. Some do this through legitimate means, such as using RSS files with permission. Others may aggregate small amounts of content under fair use guidelines. Some simply “scrape” or copy content from other sites using automated means — hence the “scraper” nickname.


In short, Google said it was going after sites that had low-levels of original content in January and delivered a week later.
By the way, sometimes Google names big algorithm changes, such as in the case of the Vince update. Often, they get named by WebmasterWorld, where a community of marketers watches such changes closely, as happened with last year’s Mayday Update.


In the case of the scraper update, no one gave it any type of name that stuck. So, I’m naming it myself the “Scraper Update,” to help distinguish it against the “Farmer Update” that Google announced today.

IIRC part of the change rolled in 2-3 weeks ago. The 'farmer' update should further damage the low quality sites' rankings. We can only hope....

 

[Tuberose]

I was wondering if anyone can tell me of a good way to search for anyone else using your images?

 

[Toddxxx]

I was wondering if anyone can tell me of a good way to search for anyone else using your images?

I used a banklink checker and saw some some strange websites linking to my images in my WordPress blog. But if they don't link to you I am not sure if there is a way to check.

Maybe search for your product names?

 

[Tuberose]

That's pretty bad when they steal your images, but if they are linking to them and using your bandwidth, that really stinks. Thanks for the info, no linking, and haven't found any image names, we must not be as popular as some of you.

 

[duanermb]

I stole an image or 2 once for a blog and had it stolen for another person's blog right after that! Word for word.

http://thefloristblog.dragonflyflow...florists-perspectives-on-long-stem-roses.aspx

Ok, I asked CHR for permission to use her stuff (and gave proper link credit), but I have seen this content on no less than 10 websites (without link back to me) since posting it back in 2009. Sad thing is that I didn't even link to myself in the post!

It's part of the game I guess.