Bloggers score a win against spam
Earlier in the week, jodi from Bloomingwriter (or should it be "jodi from Blotanical" - hard to tell where she spends her time these days :-) pointed out a site that had been scraping gardening blogs and using the content for their own purposes.
Now I'm not one to complain about other sites using my feed, provided they credit me with a link back to my blog. But this site wasn't even prepared to do that. While it all looked above board showing clickable links under each blog's name, the links just led to another page on this person's site.
Not surprising, when I tried to find some way to contact the owner, the Contact Us link was also bogus. So off I set for some moral justice trying to locate some info about the site's owner. After checking out the Whois data (most of it kept to private - surprise! surprise) it did list the dns data (or hosting service).
A quick email and a fast response indicated that the Host was happy with the site and that they hadn't contravened their Terms of Service. I pointed out that the links on the site were not external - therefore not crediting any individual blog - and while I didn't get a follow-up email, it was only a few hours later that this site no longer existed.
One small victory for garden bloggers!
On the other side of the world jodi was already reporting the site to Google's Adsense team to try and discredit the site's advertising potential. A quick reaction to bringing down a scamming opportunist.
While it may only be a small victory, it's still one step to ridding the web of people who are willing to scrape others hard work and efforts.
BTW - the host, which I would certainly recommend if they're willing to lose a customer for the sake of a better web, is NetJaguar.com. Kudos guys. And a big kudos to jodi for finding the offending site in the first place.
