I don’t know if any other anime bloggers have noticed this, but there are a lot of sites that like to grab the posts (via feeds or from automated downloads of your site) that you’ve written and then put them all together. Content-leechers come in a variety of flavors, but I’ve seen several that rip off the entire posts from a variety of sites, and make no mention of the original author (or the link is very obscure). When you first see a content-leeching site, it isn’t obvious that the content-leecher is not the true author. Some content leechers even use software that downloads your site content, in order to bypass .htaccess restrictions on hotlinking; this way your images are no safer than your text. Obviously, this is extremely frustrating.
Fortunately, some progress is finally being made in the fight against content-leechers. I had heard about Owen Winkler’s Anti-Leech WP Plugin, and I may try installing it sometime in the near future. I know it will be exciting to visit some of the leechers that steal Sea Slugs! posts and see if the plugin works. For those of you not familiar with content-leechers, check out Lorelle’s post on the topic. I prefer not to link any content-leeching sites, as this would just pad their rankings and advertising revenue.
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That happened to me a while back. If you know their ip address, there’s a way you can send them crap without it affecting your actual readers. Here’s a post from my personal blog on how to do it.
I was thinking of doing this again, but I’m kind of too lazy. A plugin would definitely be nice. (I was at one point thinking of writing one, but alas, laziness yet again)
Now that explains why I have so many hits in my /feed/ , i thought it was weird but to actually be a content-leecher never thought about it.
since I never seen a content-leeching site, it’s probably something that lists your article with no credits?
That happened to me to as well but I told them to take it off. I’d like to try that software but unfortunately I’m still running MT. Maybe I should try what Hung did.
I’ve used Hung’s method in the past, but a few scrapers still manage to get through. I find it more annoying than anything else… I doubt these sites see much in the way of genuine traffic and it’s not like they’re costing me ad revenue or anything. I just wish they’d stop cluttering up my referral lists.
Nice one Hung!
So do you know of other sites which steal content? Apart from anime-blog.com and animecube.com which Hung mentioned, I found http://weblog-pla.net/blog/category/anime/ to steal content as well.
The thing is, I don’t really see what weblog planet is trying to accomplish. It’s not like they’re gonna make sick money doing this. At least they do provide a link back to the original blog. That’s why I don’t really care too much about them.
Though no one will ever find the article on that aggregator before finding it on my actual blog…
Well, actually there is always the chance that a scraper site could get above yours. These are usually part of a link farm, and with articles stolen from a variety of quality sites, it’s like one awesome Voltron-esque mega-site. Conceivably this could trick both users and search engines, resulting in lowered traffic for the originating site. All this with virtually zero effort on the part of the scraper.
Well, if you look at Alexa you see that weblog-planet gets at least a lot more pageviews than animenano. So chances are they make more money than you.
But I wonder who visits that site and from where. If you are at least somewhat interested in anime blogs, than you use only blogsuki and animenano of course. Therefore weblog-planet shouldn’t get returning visitors.
bloganime.com is really low on alexa. That blogplanet thing is like a billion different subsites, so I guess it does get a lot of traffic.
And animeblogger.net is probably more appropriate for the voltron reference. It OWNS!