A couple days ago I discovered my website is being attacked by sploggers. To me that word sounds more like a fuzzy little alien you'd find in a game rather than what it really means. And yes, I drew that little green guy.
Splogging is when content is stolen via some automated process (also called blog scraping) and copied to an artificial blog that is usually filled with ads and affiliate links. By consistently filling this blog with stolen content, the "splogger" is able to gain money through ad clicks and searches along with an increased page rank. Quite the evil thing to do.
I had been checking my Technorati page and noticed a few sites that had duplicated my entries (some even minutes after I posted!). I didn't think much of it at first because they had linked it back to my original post.
However, after I researched it a bit more and discovered the true "identity" of what those sites were, I started to wonder just how many "splogs" were out there siphoning my content, because most likely not all of them are "nice" and have link backs. I'm not sure if I can really find every scraper out there, but maybe I could at least prevent it from happening to my future posts.
One way to locate copied content is to (obviously) google a few phrases. Since that could get pretty boring and drawn out, there are sites like CopyScape.com that searches for duplicate content by just typing in a URL. The only downside to that particular site is that you need a premium account to see more than a few results.
Luckily, I discovered a great resource with steps on how to prevent splogging on your site: 10 Steps to A More Splog-Free Wordpress Blog. It is quite informative and offers lots of ways to discover if you're being splogged and methods on how to try to prevent it from happening.
One awesome tool that is linked from that article is the CopyFeed plugin for Wordpress! It can add additional content to the end of an entry in your feed, like a copyright message for example. What I really like is that it can also add a digital fingerprint, which is a unique string of numbers that you can then use to search the web for to find if that entry was scraped. Pretty clever.
So if you're reading this entry on a feed reader, you should see some extra things at the end of it.
Hopefully it will work! If anyone has any suggestions for more ways on combating sploggers (not cute aliens!) please let me know!

It really has, thank you so much for posting it!
And thank you, yes I did create it!
The same for me, but what about entries that didn’t credit? If some do, I bet a large majority don’t. =/