I’ve been using a great WordPress plugin over the last couple of days that actually allows me to stop splogs – blogs that steal feed content to create automated content. Many plugins have been created that add a copyright notice to the bottom of RSS feeds to try and deter content thiefs. I’ve never believed that this would stop a content thief or a splog site, where the owner probably never bothers to check the feed.
The @Feed WordPress plugin does let you stop splogs by adding a digital fingerprint to your feed. This is a meaningless unique string of characters that only appears at the end of your feed that can then be searched for automatically using several search engines. If that string pops up in any web searches, then you know that any site displaying that unique digital fingerprint has stolen your content. Once thieves have been identified, @feed adds the IP address of the feed reader that accessed to the digital fingerprint which allows you to then block that feedreader from accessing any future articles and stealing future articles.
To illustrate how this works, below is a screengrab of the dashboard of my Windows 7 News site today:
This shows me that 10 posts were found with my digital signature. Clicking on the @feed link allows me to see the details of the sites:
On each site I can see that they’ve stolen my content and the IP address of the feedreader used, which I then add to my blacklist in the @feed settings. In this instance, all 3 sites were actually created by the same individual as the IP address is the same:
Armed with the @feed plugin I’m now going after content thieves. For sites that I find that have been stealing my content for a while, I’m also contacting their hosts, godaddy, adsense etc to see if I can get their sites taken down.
