UPDATE: Stealing Page Rank from Crochet Bloggers
11 August, 2009: I spoke with Brian Carr, SVP of Media at NameMedia this morning both via email and phone. Mr. Carr’s team is looking at the issue and is considering removing the “nofollow” tag for “trusted” bloggers. If you’re concerned about your content appearing on their site, I suggest you contact NameMedia via the email address below or through their page on GetSatisfaction. – Amy
I noticed recently that my blog posts and tweets are being aggressively slurped by domain name reseller NameMedia, under their “CreativeCrochet” domain. The site is ostensibly a content aggregator for crochet hobbyists, but nosing around a little further revealed that it is part of the NameMedia stable of domain names. Essentially, NameMedia buys targeted keyword domain names (like CreativeCrochet), aggregates content (pulls it from bloggers & tweeters), and builds up traffic to its site. Once the domain reaches critical mass, it’s sold.
What makes this so distasteful is that NameMedia is scraping blogs and tweets, but setting up all outgoing links to the “contributors” as “nofollow.” What does “nofollow” mean? It means that search engines won’t follow the links to the original authors of the content when they spider the site – basically robbing the original content creator of any page rank benefit. In short, CreativeCrochet improves their search engine ranking and site popularity while ensuring that the content sources remain obscure in search engines.
You may initially think that being slurped could provide some exposure for your site. The reality is that I haven’t seen a single click-through from CreativeCrochet as a referrer.
This is rather nasty business. As a veteran web developer, I was piqued to realize that my content was being scraped in this way. I am particularly annoyed because the CreativeCrochet site rebrands all of the content to imply consent (if not active participation or even payment). For example, my tweets show up under a heading marked “Creative Crochet Tweets”. Huh?
I tried to take the high road with this and sent an email to NameMedia on July 13 (more than 2 weeks ago) asking them to remove the “nofollow” tag in links to my blog. They have yet to respond or remove the tag.
Is your content being slurped? Here are two ways to respond:
- Email inquiries@namemedia.com or call +1-781-839-2800 and register a complaint.
- Block CreativeCrochet from scraping your posts by installing a plugin like Bad Behavior. UPDATE: Bad Behavior wasn’t able to block my posts from being slurped. I’ll update when I find another solution.
July 28th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Thanks for sharing. I will have to look into this. I have had a couple sites steal whole posts of mine and my husband helped me get it removed (being that he is a tech geek.) This looks a bit different, though.
July 29th, 2009 at 3:29 am
Ah, this is a problem I had a few years ago… Luckily the aggregator page didn’t visitors (probably a geek trying stuff out?)
The “no follow” is outragerous. Have you tried changing the adress of your rss feed?
But then the use of google reader and other aggregators also means blogs only get a fraction of the actual readers.
July 29th, 2009 at 7:26 am
What a travesty. I think everyone should let other bloggers know about these creeps. Not fair to anyone. Thank you for your insightful comments. I will share this info. with some of my blogging friends. You go girl!
July 30th, 2009 at 3:01 am
How do you find out if you are being “scraped”?
July 30th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Just have a look at their website (creativecrochet.com). They have a link for “Sources”, so look for your blog. You may also see your tweets appearing on their site.
You can also look at your webserver logs to see who is visiting you.
August 8th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Hi Amy,
I did a backlink check on yahoo and sure enough there was Creativecrochet.com slurping my blog posts and tweets. You can check your backlinks by typing http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com&fr=siteexplorer into your web browser. All of your backlinks will show up there.
I started investigating why my blog and tweets were listed there and did a google search which led me to this post by you. I’m going to email them tonight. I’ll let you know if I get a response. This is not cool.
August 9th, 2009 at 6:43 am
@Sonya Thanks for the comment, Sonya. Let me know if you get any results. I actually posted this article to the CreativeCrochet site, but they took it down. Unfortunately, they didn’t remove the rest of my posts. Hopefully they’ll get the message if enough of us complain.