Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:29:45 by Craig Wilson
Social networking sites are great. From everyones perspective, they're fantastic. Take Digg for example, one of the most original of its kind and certainly the most popular. Basically, it's a user-driven news website where users submit news articles from all over the Web and other users vote on which is good and which isn't. It's a great system that gives credit to some quality writing and journalism in the form of website traffic and inbound links (from an SEO point-of-view, at least). Submitting an article and it being made 'popular' isn't as easy as it sounds - bearing in mind there are thousands of users submitting thousands of articles every day; the most likely outcome is that your submission will get lost in the crowd. Compare it to shouting "Bon Jovi are great!" at a Bon Jovi concert and you'll see what I mean.
So what happens to the submissions that make it? For every user that submits a front-page article, there are 20,000 other users reading it. That's huge. 20,000 visitors in the space of a few hours. If your web server can handle the traffic, you're likely to see your advertising revenue shoot up and hundreds of new backlinks every day for a week. So like I said, social networking is great for everyone. It's great for the users who get top quality news articles every day. It's great for the user who sees their own online reputation surge. It's great for the website who published the article in the first place, and it's great for advertisers who see an increase in revenue. But it's also great for spammers.
Spammers love social networking just as much as everyone else. If they can overcome the challenge of disguising themselves as quality content, which they regularly do, they can see the same influx as everyone else. But how does it affect a website that specifically has a button for users to 'bury spam'? Simple, they do what every other user does by searching the web for quality articles and—instead of submitting this page to Digg—they steal the content, publish it on their own blog and then submit it to Digg. Occasionally some of it makes it to the front page. Technically stealing someone more worthy of traffic, inbound links, reputation and advertising revenue.
It happens all too often, and nobody seems to care except for the victim. Only this week have we seen an article hit the front page of Digg and then two days later another article hit the front page only to claim that the submission from 2 days earlier was stolen from their website. The 2nd article focused on what you should do if someone steals your content for Digg coverage. Unfortunately, the user exhausts all options to help take down the blog spam and redirect the credit to himself, but it's all in vain. He contacts the original spammer to no avail. He contacts the spammer's web host and receives no feedback. He reports them to Digg and it's too late for anything to be done. In the end, all he could do was ask webmasters who linked to the stolen content to redirect their links to the original webpage instead. A lot of people obliged, but not enough to compensate for his loss.
So it looks like the spammer got away with it. What else can you do besides contacting the bodies in charge? This sort of behaviour is increasing at a huge rate and deters a lot of talented people from openly publishing their work online. It's steering us towards more subscription based websites and registration forms to put off spammers. Which isn't great for anyone; it isn't great for the users who have to pay for top quality content, it isn't great for the author as their coverage is restricted and it isn't great for advertisers who are now targeting a smaller audience.
So how do we stop it? What can we do to prevent our content from being stolen? No follow links were implemented when comment spam was out of control, can something similar be used for outright stealing? Unfortunately, there's very little that can be done technically to prevent this from happening. You can do your part though by using a website like CopyScape, which searches the web for copies of your web page. If you find any duplicates, you can go down all of the official channels mentioned earlier and try and have it removed. If the website runs Google's AdSense, you can also report the page to Google. Besides those options, you're pretty much on your own.
Craig Wilson
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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