Sigh. Not a spammer.
I got a lovely email just now threatening me for being a notorious spammer:
Your doing it to drive up your Google Rank is pitiful, though I’ve informed Google of your attempts to game their system. Further evidence of scraping will be dealt with through the legal system. Perhaps a note to [your employer] will be of use as well.
I sent back my reply, which indicates that no I am not a spammer, thank you very much:
I’m terribly sorry you are experiencing web scrapers, but honest-to-god it’s not me. I wrote a plugin a long time ago for Wordpress called “WP Autoblog” that can take an RSS feed and import them as a series of posts. The posts get branded with attribution like “Post by XYZ and software by me” which you’re probably mistaking for something I’m actively a part of. I wrote the plugin to aggregate some of my family blogs (ericback.com, elliottback.com) together into a single feed, but it quickly became abused by spammers so I pulled it. You can read more here.
All this in spite of people making photo-aggregators, sitewide tagging, and making Planet sites. I can’t believe how much grief a hacky Wordpress plugin has given me over the years. Hopefully as it gets more and more out of date, this query count will start to drop from 400k (not that much) to a few hundred. Then I will smile.
| This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 12:07 am and is tagged with honest to god, aggregators, scrapers, autoblog, spammer, google, xyz, spammers, grief, spite, attempts, long time, email, reply, game. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
You try to do a good thing and this is what you get.. That’s the live
o i was totally unaware of all this stuff.
Oh, I see what happened. I always thought YOU were the one sploggin all this time.
Hey Elliot, I can relate. I provide free Wordpress themes and lately have been getting emails demanding me to remove content from “my” site. When it’s actually some site I’ve never even heard of which is happening to use a free theme I’ve provided.
Hey Mig, I’m aware of this. I mentioned my nofollow scheme in an older post; it should work ok for things like this.
As I see you offer text link ads on your blog. Google is out to get anyone who does that, so if what you write about is not a real issue, monetizing your site by selling links is. Good that they have nofollow though.
That’s a bit of a nasty email… I gotta say, your response was much more polite than mine might have been. That “everything is your fault” attitude is particularly silly when it’s completely wrong.