Thank you MEG—- I look forward to reading this very informative site and comments!!!

Kindest Reards
Tink

@ Snos - of course I don’t mind the link - very relevant. Lorelle also suggests creating a Google Alert for your byline.

She’s got an update on some other relevant links for plagiarism in last week’s digest.

As to some draft letters, that’s a good idea. I’ll have a look into it.

@ Tinker

I imagine that image theft is probably one of the most virulent examples of content theft on the internet. Lorelle suggests for images

“In the ALT attribute, write “Image Copyright MY Name My Blog”. Make sure that your copyright policy includes referencing images and graphics.”

As for other content, see my comment to Snoskred, and I can recommend her blog tips post.

What’s so frustrating and unfair is we have to pay high dollar for images etc, even when we don’t have to credit them– we still do anyway, but there are many (splogs?) out there who just take images from agency sites etc, and some have more traffic than we do— do good guys always come in last? lol In all honesty, there has been a trend I have seen- for example: So and So blogs about ….today, etc, but I think going the extra MILE so-to-speak and write the original writer is an extra step, not just linking or quoting.

Is there a site or google alert that lets you know if your content is copied etc? Thanks and nice to meet all of you.

Tinker Vanderbelt
PR Girl

That’s one way. I have recently found a couple by google alerts.

If you set up google alerts for your name and the name of your blog, this can be really useful. Setting up google alerts is simple and easy, I posted a how to on my blog a little while back which (hopefully Meg won’t mind me linking to it) you can find here.

Handy Blog Tips

I think emailing google is an excellent way to go - and here’s an idea which might help.

When I was working against the 419 scammers, we often had to report fake banking websites to webhosts. In order to make it easier to report them we came up with a template - you could just fill in the blanks.

I suggest someone (unfortunately not me, I’m a bit flat out right now, sorry!) takes the time to write up a simple I found this blog (insert blog link) which has stolen my content, this is against blah de blah and blah de blah, the website breaks your terms of service (have one for google, have one for other common offenders if there are any) I respectfully request that you immediately remove this website blah blah etc.

If you make it so simple for people to report, people will happily do it - and we can start to get the splogs shut down.

Perhaps Matt Cutts could supply a contact at google to whom such reports should go, both for adsense thingys and for blogger blogs?

You could have a simple, basic template for reporting splogs to advertisers, too. Something like - I just thought you should know you have an ad on this site which has stolen content from myself and other bloggers. I suggest you immediately withdraw your advertisements from this blog.

Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org/

As for your question, I do think it is worth a quick email if you find someone else’s content stolen but again, it is quite difficult to have your content removed or at least acknowledged. I myself invariably find our posts stolen because of the high number of internal links but I rarely know what I could do about this. But your idea about creating a list of splogs is good, I think - it won’t even take much efforts from all of us because we can easily collect all the trackbacks from splogs. And in order not to make the owner of such a list a target for the sploggers to attack, we can for example create a new group of StumbleUpon to post all the splogs there. And we could also email Google abuse department about this group so that they could track new postings and take actions. But still I see a problem: we will need to “discover” the splogs to be able to post them into the group. And I definitely would not want to generate traffic for splogs myself. Besides, you can not click thumbs down when discovering a new site – only the following voters can use this option. Any ideas?

I meant to thank you for the links you left earlier…

I can see your point about making a target out of any site that contains such a list, and it would probably just serve to direct more traffic to the site in any case.

I have seen some posts about Google being pretty swift to act in these situations, which is encouraging.

Thanks again for your input