Are you an affiliate marketer? Then you want to read this post. Spam posts and RSS feeds, what’s up with that? I noticed something very interesting when I made my first post. I say a real neat trick done by some black hat marketer. People for ages have done things, often unethical things to gain traffic. The thing is there are some tools to protect you against spam and content theft. Akismet it seems is a great tool, to stop and identify spam, however what is there to protect us against content theft?

Here’s what happened when I first set up this blog and made my first post.

I posted http://forex.earninternet.com/archives/forex-affiliate-conference-las-vegas-25-26th-july-2008

Will actually that was the edited post link because when I did the original post I was set to default permalink, and I was set to default pinging. About two hours after I did the original post I set up custom links. This is a key issue because I know that before I actually edited the link a bot had come by and stole my content. Here’s what happened

Within 1 hour a bot comments Name=”Title of my post” link to explainedhere*com (Akismet blocked it, I use *com for the thieves domain so I don’t link back to his site)

Message = [..] Original post by Make Money Stock Market *com […]

IP of poster is 74.53.229.146 (933 other URLs on that IP) Theplanet.com Internet Services Inc Dallas

(this tells me he is using a cron on the server to execute)

Now when I go to his site (replace the dot and you can check)

http://forex-trade.explainedhere.xxx/forex-affiliate-conference-las-vegas-25-26th-july-2008/

At that link is the about 50 words of the beginning of the post I made, spacings removed. When you look at the page is clear he’s using my content to pull traffic from the search engines. The site has been up about three months and when I checked today he has 9,670 posts, all stolen from other blogs. He is an affiliate marketer, and also uses google adsense to monetize. And did he credit the source, no! On the post he stole he states “Original post by Make Money Stock Market*com″

The reason I know he grabbed the post so quick is that he has old link http://forex.earninternet.com?p=4 that I change appears in his repost.

When you click on the header of the article you go to another page and still it’s in condensed form but now full of more adsense ads. He does have a link back.

UPDATE — His google ads are gone, I assume he is now banned, hum maybe google does listen. Now I will look to get google to delist his site.

His clickbank affilate# mattonitto promoting http://www.forex-killer*com/?hop=mattonitto

Now here’s the kicker, Compete shows him having 5,200 unique visitors a month. And as you are well aware Google does not like duplicate content. Well he got my post listed in google before me and as a result gets the traffic for my work. So the question to you all is how does one protect against that? Of course contacting google might help. And now of course I can block that IP. Does anybody know where there’s a list of offenders?

PS Check out my new ForexVideos