Tag Archives: content theft

mxhub.com – spammers

12

There is a dirty little company going around forums promoting the fact that they will install hundreds of blogs. I asked them something:

Hi, I saw your post at Digitalpoint.
You say you can setup blogs and customize them. This is what I would
be after:
- I choose 5 themes, each blog to use one of those
- feedwordpress installed and prepopulated with the feeds I will be
pulling in. There will one set of feeds for every 10 blogs.
- cron jobs set up to regularly pull the feeds in
- my adsense publisher ID to be inserted into each blog / plugin as
needed
- I would like the default ping list in the blog changed to one I
already use elsewhere. It pings 30 services.
- do you auto-upgrade? I’d like these blogs set up and for me to do
nothing except collect those Google checks :)

Hi Mark,
It can be done.

Do you have MSN , AIM or skype?
It is easier for me to take down all the things you need.
Skype: mxhub.com
MSN: joseph@mxhub.com
AIM: jjwaterfall82

I suggest setup a blog with all the plugins & theme..i will duplicate it into multiple copies.

Do you have root access for your server?

So if you too want to join the splogging, spamming and thieving pondlife you just need to give joseph at mxhub.com your money.

mxhub.com – content theft our speciality.

A big free clue for Google

9

If you have a paid link on your blog Google will throw you out of their results.
If you have any links hidden on your blog the same happens.
If your site has been compromised and links inserted the same happens again.
If you are seen as harming Google they punish you. That’s fair enough because it’s their business but what it should be doing is looking after people whose work is being stolen. And it’s not just stolen it enriches the thief and also Google. Is there therefore an incentive to do what I’m going to describe? probably not…
The point here is that Google can tell a lot about your site.

Like many bloggers I can spot a splog in less than 10 seconds. The common features:
- Every entry has “wrote an interesting post” “read the rest of the post here” “..talked today about”
- Most entries are uncategorised
- There is an absence of comments
- The theme is one from a selected range no doubt sold for the “SEO friendliness”
- The posting frequency will be high and fairly regular
- There is no easily obtained webhost information (so no ToS, AUP, DMCA addresses)
- ads. And more often than not contextual ones which means Adsense.
- there are more clues but scoring more than half the above means you are looking at content theft.

Now if I can join those dots why can’t Google? Why can’t the other search engines? After all if the big advertisers don’t care about content theft why should the other guys? Why is it not possible to suspend those accounts that meet most of the above? Why can’t you grab the publisher id and suspend automatically? Why can’t the above raise some flags and a single abuse complaint ensure it is seen faster? I really do find it amazing that a company which can bring us so much good cannot add up what a splog looks like without being told.
And the bonus is that your blog search would be cleaned up – which pleases everyone.

Matt Cutts wants an idea of something to do – there you go.