Splogs
July 14th, 2007 • web
I’m starting to get hits from splogs (spam blogs) that do nothing more than aggregate your feeds and steal your content (PROTIP: there are WP plugins to stop this) in order to jack up their PageRank and make money from AdSense. They’re just as bad as MFA (Made For AdSense) sites. They’re also in clear violation of my own copyright but I’ll have a fun time trying to win that case so I set for some answers. A certain site was stealing my content so I searched for something quick to fix it. I came across this post from someone having the same problem. It’s a great one-time fix, in fact, that’s just what it is. Once WordPress updates wp-trackback.php, you have to re-edit the code. Problem is, what if you forgot you made that change? The splogs soon make their return. I’m not saying this is a bad solution, not by far. However, lots of people are not very comfortable editing code of any kind, that’s why they use things like WordPress.
I’ve got two extremely simple solutions, one for server owners and one for web hosting users. First up, my easy and always-in-place fix:
route add 71.246.159.83 reject
route add 72.249.33.141 reject
These are two IPs of some rising splogs. Now, that’ll stop them from ever hitting my feed and my content forever as long as I stay on my server. Next up, web hosting solution:
order deny, allow
deny from 71.246.159.83
deny from 72.249.33.141
allow from all
And put that in your local .htaccess file. This is the most portable solution for when you have to move providers. The only problem with this is that if you have multiple sites under multiple accounts — on the same server or otherwise — you’ve got a lot of .htaccess files to update. Still, however, this remains 100% portable and will always work for your blog as long as your hosting provider uses Apache or another server that supports .htaccess files.
