We’re contributing to someone else’s media property and hey, we didn’t even know. So is Frederick Samuel, John Moore and David Vinjamuri. I bet they lacked prior knowledge of their valuable contributions, as well.
So what is this? Are we to be delighted our content is worth picking up? Or pissed that an interloper dares to frame us as willing participants in his project?
I had to deal with a splog last month. I grabbed an autorefresher, left it on and went to a class. In a few hours it clocked a few thousand hits. The guy must’ve gotten the hint, because the splog was gone the next morning. I wrote about the whole experience here: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2005/09/getting-in-touch-with-blog-content.html
In the hindsight, I don’t know whether it was effective in diluting the splog’s AdSense click-through because it seems that Google filters out repeated hits from the same IP, but hey, it worked.
Thanks for sharing your solution, Ilya!
Yes, you are absolutely right, I had no idea. This particular effort looks like a bit more than spam, but I cannot tell exactly what it is. Do you know?
It’s difficult to say what his exact intentions are, but I believe the renegade site will move to some type of ad revenue when its numbers warrant that.
He removed our content after we asked him to do so.
Ah the old “set your content free but control it” conundrum… The main thing I would complain about is the lack of links back to adpulp. It looks less like you’re a willing participant and more like it’s his content. A link back to the original source gives you credibility, gives your pirate credibility, and gives search engines a path to rank the source top of the list (which he probably doesn’t want, otherwise he wouldn’t be stealing content).
But good luck with stopping it. I find my content all over the place, but I usually use my content to promote my personal knowledge (“Hey Mr. Prospect — check out my blog on exactly your problem and now pay me to come consult!”)