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Ahoy Me Mateys, Blog Pirates Ahead

posted on August 1, 2007


The Download Squad has reached that level of success that many a blogger fears and at the same time quietly wishes for – they’ve become so popular that others are scraping their content.

Come on, admit it. The first time your blog was scraped, you had two reactions.

The outward one – “Those B@#$&!! they stole my post and didn’t even link back to me!”

The inward one – “Cool, my blog is finally popular enough that the spammers are stealing it.”

Download Squad compares the practice to 17th century pirates…

When we started to look into the phenomenon of Blog Piracy, it was like sailing through the blue waters of the Caribbean circa the 17th century – suddenly the Blog Pirates were absolutely everywhere. Googling recent posts from Download Squad likewise turns up a host of blog pirates, such as the so called Software Online Guide (which looks more like a homage site to Download Squad than an actual blog) these folks are cutting and pasting for fun and profit, but probably without that much of either.

I personally gave up trying to fight the blog pirates. Even if you’re successful in getting one to stop, another pops-up within days (probably by the same guys).

How do you handle blog pirates? Do you board their ship and give them a good thrashing, or do you just keep on sailing?


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  • http://www.alibiproductions.com Drew Stauffer

    I think you gotta keep on sailing. There’s not much you can do about it.

    I had my blog hacked two days ago and I went through the same feelings…pissed and slightly honored.

  • http://www.seoposition.com Brian Gilley

    Arrrrhhh! You get on board and give them a good thrashing. — of course, I’ve been watching too much UFC lately, so I’m a bit biased between what method to use.

  • http://horisly.blogspot.com horisly

    blog private is really a great deal.

  • http://www.u-g-h.com Owen

    There are a number of plugins to protect against content scraping. There’s a good review of a couple (well 5 actually) here:

    http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/10/09/five-essential-wordpress-con tent-protection-plugins/

  • http://www.srclarke.com Todd Mintz

    I love it when folks scrape my affiliate links and I start to sell products that I haven’t been selling. This happens once in a while.

  • http://www.seorefugee.com/seoblog SEO Refugee Blog

    I think I may have mentioned this before but we once had someone copy all of our code rather than just the content so we ended up seeing the site on Google Analytics and MyBlogLog etc. It was kinda fun to keep an eye on and find out where their traffic came from and went.

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    LOL – I must remember those tricks. ;-)

  • http://www.lff.com Fitness guy

    There’s nothing you can do, especially now the the scrapers are getting much better at “rewriting” you blogs.

  • http://www.justinsweblog.com Justin

    Its happened to me a few times before, but nothing good or bad ever came from it.

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  • http://andybeard.eu/ Andy Beard

    Andy, you missed something, they actually gave the scrapers good links.

    I don’t fight scrapers, it is not worth the effort, and there is a good chance half the backlinks reported on Technorati that top blogs receive are from scrapers.

  • http://bushidoblog.com.ar Bushido

    People will do all sorts of stuff to get links. Oh, when you have time, why don’t you read my last post on my blog: “Ahoy me mateys, blog pirates ahead” :D

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    LOL @ Bushido

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