Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

Filed Under DIY (Do It Yourself), Comics

I've begun to notice there are tons of blogs that are automated on the internet. Instead of writing content yourself, these blogs automate the process of grabbing and linking content. You probably don't realize they're robot blogs at first, but once you read a few, there is something that just doesn't sound right. A blog about psychology has posts about video games, anna nicole smith, and viagra. The posts are random, almost as if a robot were blogging.

I think my blog, is being autoblogged. Basically, that means they take the content from by blog, and put it on their blog. In one sense, that's good. My article gets published and spread around without me having to do it. I'm all for that, and I provided the content for free, specifically so it would be distributed. Except these autoblogs are not giving credit as the author.

Free isn't Free enough?
That's a really shitty thing to do, because it takes upwards of 8hrs to create each of these blog posts. Write spell-check, etc… I won't bore you with details. Anyway, it's all this is done for free. Eight hours is a long time to work and not be paid. My payment, is generating more traffic to my site though links, and hopefully someone will spread the word about my comics or cat furniture, so the cycle continues.

Honestly, that is a terrible marketing strategy, but it's better than nothing. It does work, but not as well as traditional advertising. However, traditional advertising easily costs thousands, and not return the money back through sales. So, to go the FREE route, means jumping through a lot of hoops, to show your products to people who aren't really interested. Hoping they remember who you are when they're ready to buy something.

You're busted
Autoblogging cheats are easily caught, because a quick check of server logs shows where all the image hits are coming from. Also, searches can be done in Google for phrases in the article. So, not only do they steal the article, they suck your bandwidth too boot. Let's up the ante shall we? Let's see if you dare rip off Super Unit 5000 and DJ Coffman of Hero by Night at the same time. The only thing you have to do is provide a link back to me or DJ Coffman. I'll throw in a bonus with this image of Alec Baldwin drawn with monkey nipples.

Retaliate
Autoblogging thieves don't seem to take the trouble to edit images. They don't even bother to host their own copy of the images. They link directly to them, called hotlinking. The way to strike back against these thieves, is to credit yourself in the images, so at least your name appears somewhere in their post. Or, simply change what the image is, while preserving the file name. It could be your own advertisement, tub girl, or gay porn.

That's a fun trick to play on the mySpace people. I had an image of Iron Maiden on my site once, that was getting 500 hits a day from many domains. I simply changed the image to an advertisement for my own site and instantly got 500 free ad impressions. I guess it took them a long time to realize the image had been replaced.

The only way to avoid being caught autoblogging is to re-write the article, and that would totally negate the benefit of autoblogging. I'm not against autoblogging, or even hot linking… It's a great idea, as long as you give credit, where credit is due.