Now that I have your attention I just wanted to let you know that I am not an advocate for using other people’s content to make money without their knowledge. I noticed an incoming link so I clicked over to check out who was linking to me…as I always do. To my surprise I found an article that I had written, word for word posted on someone else’s site.

To make things even more juicy this person had posted Text Link ads on my content as if it were their own. Now anyone who clicks on those words would be making the scraper blog money…..and I would not be seeing a cent of this. I was going to post the link up here but then I decided that they should not get the satisfaction of getting a link back from me.

I noticed that at the bottom of the post they did mention that it was from my site so I was going to let it go. Then I decided to comment on the blog and ask the owners why they were posting full articles from other blogs on their site and putting up ads on them. I did not get a response but in a few minutes the incoming link to my site mysteriously disappeared.

I noticed that there were other posts from blogs that I read daily so I notified those bloggers about what was being done. Maybe I am overreacting here. Is it okay to repost someone’s entire article if you just post the name of their blog on the bottom of the post? Is it okay to repost someone else’s work and put up your own ads on it and make money off it? I think it is wrong but hey, that might just be me only thinking that way.

I reported the offender to sites that track splogs and was surprised when one of them notified me that this particular scraper had already been reported. The link came back on today but I am waiting to see what else happened. Bloggers please check your incoming links to make sure that your content is not being scraped to make some splog earn revenue based on your hard work.