Combating Splogs and Content Theft
October 18th, 2006
WP Station has been victim of this for some time. Someone sets up a generic WP install, and starts scraping content from various blogs that offer WP news, tips, and tricks. They would come and go, and eventually the main culprit of WP Station content theft included links back to my site, so I didn’t think there was anything else left to do. In my hiatus, two new plugins have been introduced to help combat content theft.
The first, AntiLeech, from Owen Winkler at Redalt, creates fake content for sploggers who use bots to steal content from your site.
The second, Digital Fingerprint, from MaxPower, creates a unique “fingerprint” only seen in your RSS feed, so you can track your content on various blog search engines. From there, you can determine if the content is properly referenced, and take actions if not.
I highly suggest reading through the explanations at both plugin sites to further understand the issues at play.