koan - 9:19 am on Feb 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

I've been searching for copies of my articles for one of my site tonight and this just discourages me. Here I have an old, unique, well written article. It has maybe 1-2 inbound links. Oh well, they sure don't come by easily these days. But what I find are about a hundred copies elsewhere, usually with no attribution, in social networks, forums, answer sites, journals, article & essay sites, free blogs, even profiles in Youtube. On the very rare case that it does, the link is obviously nofollowed. Then I catch someone rewriting it very slightly and publishing it on a few dozens rogue blogs copying everything under the sun, all linking to their main site. On top of that, these super crappy blogs have Adsense ads. Other copies are found in "submit your articles" sites, again linking to their own site as the source.

I went through the painstaking process of sending DMCAs or copyright infringement notifications to Google Adsense, social networks, web hosting companies, or notices to owners where I thought they might just be clueless about what they're doing. I wasted a few hours in rage on a Friday night just for this one article.

Then I wonder why my earning are declining. It's a huge mess out there, people clueless about copyrights and others looking to make a quick buck by stealing content.

Why is Google indexing this crap when quality sites have sometimes trouble being fully indexed? Why is one Blogger or Blogspot site with 0 Pagerank or inbound links and no unique content actually competes with a quality site in the results? What is Adsense doing on those sites? You know these sites are bogus by looking at them for one freaking second. All these social networks, web hosts and articles sites should really be more severe with abusive users like that. A big flashy warning in red about copyrights when they sign up. One case of blatant infringement, ban the whole account.

Sorry had to get this off my chest.