Reporting Spam and Plagiarism on Blogs
While looking at recently published blogs on WordPress.com, I ran across one that talked about the wonders of Craigslist — published just two days before, but the information was two years old. A quick search found it was an exact copy of an article PC World had written two years before, as were two other posts from the same blog. I reported the blog as spam to WordPress.com, included the original URLs, and emailed PCWorld as well. The blog was removed within 24 hours, as was the case with a spam blog/splog that I reported.
Unfortunately, it is easy to miss where to report spam on WordPress.com, as it is hidden under “Blog Info” and only visible if you are logged in to a WordPress.com account. You would think to use that link as an “about me” type of link rather than a place to report spam or a mature blog. WordPress.com would likely better serve its users (and the users of other online media with content being plagiarized) by changing the interface to something like Blogger uses — a very easy to understand way to report spam or questionable content — presuming the splog does not find a way around the displaying of the flag. However, this is just a flag, with no place to write an explanation, and it does not request the removal of copyrighted materials. Google requires this form to be filled out to request removal of copyrighted material.
My post is a commentary on the UI, with side kudos to WordPress,com for their quick action regarding the two blogs I reported. For help on identifying and report splogs, I recommend reading:
How to Spot a Splog and What Do You Do when Someone Steals Your Content, by Lorelle on WordPress.
How to Complain and Report Spam Blogs (for Blogger blogs), and reporting the splogs to Google Adsense and the major search engines. By Quick Online Tips.
Updated 12 April 2007 to include additional reporting information for the two services.
