WordPress Plugin Puts Your Best Foot(er) Forward
Have you heard the term splog? “A splog (spam blog) is a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated Web sites, with the intent of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic.” What the owners of these “sites” (sploggers) many times use is software to farm copyright protected postings off other Blogs to post on these shallow sites. When they do this, rarely is the original author given credit or the customary link back to their site acknowledging the source of the article.
So those of us who write the original content that ends up on these self-serving and many times useless sites, do whatever we can to try and ensure that our content is marked like dogs mark their backyards.
This cool plugin allows you to add a footer link with unique text in your RSS feed — the very feed that gets farmed by splogger software. When your articles end up on a splog, it will contain a link to your original post and your Blog.
Even if the HTML that creates the links get’s stripped, you can easily set up Google Alerts for the unique text you put in that footer link to alert you when one of your articles with this footer in place is discovered by Google. I’ve had many a site shutdown that I know the splogger wonders how the heck I found my post on their site so quickly — it really works!
Google Alerts allow you to review the sites farming your content. Hey, the bottom line is it is your choice what sites your content is displayed on! If the site does not have that active link that any smart author requires to republish their collateral, you then can at the very least investigate the DNS of the domain to determine the host of the site. Without that link, I immediately file a formal DMCA complaint (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to get my content removed. All reputable hosting companies have specific procedures how to do this in their TOS.
The RSS Footer WordPress plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds. Why not give it a try and put your best foot(er) forward?
At your service,
Judith
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