Occasionally — actually more and more here recently — I notice articles from The LawDog Files showing up in some unusual sites.
These sites tend to have nonsense names, and appear to be mostly adverts for various items and services.
This time it’s “do12d-dot-ooeoyi-dot-com”, “do12f-dot-ooeoyi-dot-com”, and “st3b-dot-ooeoyi-dot-com”.
I am spelling out the web addresses, because I’m not sure I want a link from these sites back to my blog.
You can find them by going to Google, clicking on ‘more’, then ‘ Blogs’, enter “LawDog” as the search parameter, then sort the results by date.
Right now, it’s three of my tales, lifted verbatim.
As I prowl about a bit, the taste I get is that maybe these sites are created by some kind of automated program, which selects random web-content to display — I’m guessing related somehow to some kind of spamming.
The thing is, I’m not for sure. Does anyone out there have a clue as to what is going on?
I’d hate to need to go all Gotterdammerung on someone and not know it — kind of lets down the side and all.
LawDog
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Mine too.
They look like they are pushing naughty sites and linking to my posts that have misconstrued to have other meanings.
I’ve thought about killing the links but not sure what harm is being done.
The clue is the presence of massive Google Adsense ads. The automated programs that set these sites up are trying to attract people through search engines that will hopefully click through the Google ads.
Both Basil’s Blog and MacBros place have had problems with this sort of thing, but enforcement is difficult, since the automated programs just keep on rolling even if you shut them down site by site.
It’s probably best to let the search engine maintainers deal with scrubbing those sites from their databases than do anything yourself.
These sites may also try to profit on defunct blogs and other sites. A lot of popular sites disappear from the net, but people still search for them. Spam sites may try to capture some traffic from that.
(You’d probably have more success removing your stories from message boards or mailing lists than spammers. That’s why spammers are so hated.)
(You’d probably have more success removing your stories from message boards or mailing lists than spammers. That’s why spammers are so hated.)
Why would I want to remove my stories from message boards?
As long as either myself, or this blog, is credited for the stories, I fully encourage anyone who feels the urge to go ahead and post my stories on message boards.
However, I don’t want my stories, or this blog, being used to sucker innocents into clicking on spam, trojan, virus or other malware links.
And I damned sure don’t want someone else making money off my stories without my consent.
Kill the links wherever possible.
There are two things happening:
(1) “Click Fraud” — per Ferd’s post about the Google Ads — these @$$#0!3$ are getting paid every time someone gets suckered into clicking their site instead of yours.
(2) They are “harvesting” content from blogs — including yours — to use when spamming to fool “bayesian” filters (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering ). The gist of it is that in order to fool the filter, they paste in lots of legitimate text gleaned from various sources. This legitimate text causes the filters to falsely determine the message is not spam.
If you use HTML mail and often get big SPAM messages that seem to be filled with white space, they’ve made the color of the “stolen” text white to hide it from your view.
In either case, I’d like to have 5 minutes with one of them and a louisville Slugger.
8@$+@rd$.
DD