is this some kind of spam scheme?

I recently wrote a blogpost about the two Korean dancers who died of malaria they contracted while in South Africa.  A few hours later, I see my content is up on another blog without attribution or links. The post had all my links stripped away and a few new ones added in a strange way.  The word "health" was somewhat randomly inserted into the post several times with links to elsewhere in the same blog.  A few words were also changed.  My post had apparently been copied and then pasted twice into the new post.

I am not encouraging you to check any of these links - although the first two are to my blog, but would like to hear if this is...well, what is this?  Why do this?


My original post:

http://surprisesaplenty.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/koreans-in-south-africa...

My comments -same as above:

http://surprisesaplenty.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/this-is-goshdarned-stra...


The other site that posted my material:

http://www.health-care-health.co.cc/2010/07/weight-loss-koreans-in-south...

Re: Sploggers

I believe these kinds of spam blogs are called 'splogs'.  
http://www.devtopics.com/splogs-spam-blogs-and-stolen-content/
Sploggers are definitely polluters of the cyber-environment and it's pretty hard to defend against them. 

Google does a pretty decent job of weeding them out of search results and you can always report them for  adsense violations at: https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=18386
(although the scraper that grabbed your stuff doesn't have ads on that site, the sites that they link to do)

Re: Sploggers

Looks like the caught wind of your displeasure... the link is dead or moved.

Nice post by the way.

Re: Sploggers

Either i agree; Jeff's explanation was clear and concise, or thanks from me.

Re: is this some kind of spam scheme?

It's a common tactic used with SEO (search engine optimization) .... content is copied (or goes through a VERY week editing process) and live links are added to 'back link' to other material. I'm surprised they didn't back link to your site as that is very common to show the 'source' ...


The reason this is done, is to build traffic and give google 'spiders' many avenues to run and therefore many ways to identify your page with the hopes of obtaining a high page ranking.

Copy pasta of content is rampant, his choice of links may seem strange, but most of the time they are just building 'pathways' for the spiders to identify.


Hope that helps.


(also, don't be hesitant to contact the webmaster over there and show the plagiarism..