I don’t think people realize just how many splogs there are, or even what a splog is. Splogs scrape content from other blogs( usually through RSS) and post it as their own(usually), loading it up with ads for a quick buck.

From maxpower.ca:

The total number of blogs out there passed 50 million a month ago. 175,000 new blogs are created every day. There about 5.3 million blog postings per day, seventy percent of which are actually ’spam’ from a splog. In other words, seventy percent of all blog postings are spam (State of The Blogosphere, 2006)

But these splogs are quickly set up and likewise can be easily detected using wordpress plugins. There are two popular plugins that combat splogs and scrapping RSS in very different ways: AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint.

AntiLeech takes the more forward approach feeding the RSS scraper fake content with a link back to your site. AntiLeech functions by detecting User-Agent strings or IP address that you block from within the options panel. AntiLeech also aggregates data on User-Agents that you might want to block( definitely a nice feature ).

Note: It looks as if antileech is down.

But what if AntiLeech isn’t enough? It is solid but not all around protection. Who better to trust with your content than you right?

Digital Fingerprint takes a different approach. It embeds an invisible fingerprint into your RSS feed which you can later search the blogosphere for. This will allow you to find whoever or wherever your content is being republished(and if necessary carry out a worldwide hack the planet style DOS attack ala Hackers on them). This gives you more work, but hey you didn’t really want to go to bed yet anyway!

Of course feedburner detects scrapping too, so you could just use that, but whats the fun in catching thieves if you don’t get your hands a little dirty.. Got any other ways of protecting your content?