Animal blog owners beware, there is a thief on the prowl
Do you own an animal blog? If you do you had better be aware of a blog thief I just found. The thief is Animals on blogspot and here is their link. This blog thief has taken several of my blog posts and posted them on their blog as their own work. This scumbag has been doing it since May 2010 to not only my blog to to many others as well. Here is a list of the other blogs that it has ripped off:
weloveourlabs.com
petsitusa.com/blog
puppyfast.blogspot.com
cooldogbreedswithpictures.com
For the Love of the Dog Blog (their email newsletter)
They have even taken email newsletters from companies they have subscribed to and plastered those emails on there. The biggest clue to where they got the blog posts, other than doing a copy paste from each blog, is that they were subscribed by email to each of them, including me.
What I have done already is officially notify Google of copyright infringement via their online form, if you are also a victim here is the form to use. Google usually shuts down blogs like that almost instantly. Next I will notify all of the blogs that I found on that blog and give them a heads up. They should also report the offending blog, the more complaints the quicker the action and if they have other blogs Google might shut them down too (if they are doing the same thing to other hobbies or interests).
Why am I so concerned? There are 2 main reasons. #1, I hate it when people claim something that I wrote as their own work and #2, Google does not like duplicate work and will down grade one of them and I don’t want it to be me.
If I cannot get it shut down right away I will have to suspend all those that have subscribed to my blog via email and only let subscription via Kindle or feedburner in a reader from now on. That is not what I want to do as not everyone wants or has a Kindle. Since Amazon likes to have feeds for the Kindle set at full and not summary, I might have to get advice from them too as to how to handle the length of my blog’s feeds. I do want to give my Kindle subscribers their money’s worth, after all they are paying to read my blog everyday.
Let’s hope this thief can be put out of business soon.
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July 18th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Thank you for letting me know.I have seen people do this before and I usually can’t do anything about it. Thanks for listing the link to the Google form to report it.
July 18th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
To find out if your content has been ripped off you should also check with copyscape. I found 3 more blogs that way that also had my stuff on there. One I emailed the owner with a warning and the others had no contact info but they were blogspot blogs so I’ll let Google take care of them. It is almost an on going battle.
July 18th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Thanks for letting me know as well. I do not publish full feeds, I instead chose the summary option in wordpress so they can only publish an excerpt on their blog of my posts with a link to the full article, but I too have content thieves, so I will notify Google.
Another good option is to use, ©Feed plugin for Wordpress, adds a digital footprint to your blog posts, and a fully customizeable message with a link back to your sites.
This scumbag behavior is typical on the web.
July 21st, 2010 at 9:19 am
Well, I seem to have better control of RSS feed scrappers. I now publish a warning at the ends of my RSS feeds which seems to deter the thieves. I have noticed that 3 email subscribers has been dropped already. Google has also been really great about helping me out. They have removed 4 blog posts so far and are working with me on 2 others. Many people seem to think that there is nothing you can do about it, but I am proving them wrong, you can do something about it and win.
I am finding out that one person who has http://pet-advice.blogspot.com/ is a copy and paste person and there are lots of blogs, news articles and other stuff that has been put on that blog, including mine with photos. If your stuff is on there report it and get it shut down.
July 26th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
I just found your blog and am so happy to see this post. I have had two major infringements of my text on my web site and my Facebook Page. After jumping through all the hoops required by Facebook and the thief’s web site Server, I was blessed with quick justice: the thief’s FB Page was completely shut down and so was her web site. As a courtesy I emailed the offender three times before sending the official complaints and she did not even respond. It was very, very gratifying to see an intellectual property thief be caught and punished. Thanks for your information here.