Last week, when I looked at my stats, I noticed a couple of hits from a site that seemed somewhat odd to me. Because of the workload last week, I didn’t have time to investigate it further.

But today I did. And upon going to that site, I was upset to see that they had copied entire posts from my blog, without my permission, and posted them on their site — but peppered with ads. It seems a scraper has found me.  But it’s not just my blog — I also saw posts from some of the blogs which I read regularly on there. They too were peppered with ads. I have written to the scraper’s web host and to Google asking that the offending posts from my blog on the scraper site be taken down, but upon doing some research today I was horrified to find out this is becoming more and more common.

What these scrapers do is take our content. We spend the time writing the posts, taking the photos and editing them, checking them over before we hit that “publish” button.  What do the scrapers do? Nothing. They just swoop in, copy our content, paste it on their site, pepper our content with ads and sit back and make money. It’s clearly copyright violation run amok! I am not giving out the offending site address as I don’t want to drive any more traffic their way than they’re already getting.

And that explains why I’ve noticed a few of my favourite blogs are now truncating their posts so that all that’s seen in the blog reader are the first few lines or a short excerpt from their blog post. I swore I’d never do that, but now I’m having second thoughts.

You can read a great post about these scrapers here. And another here. And yet another here.

And now I find myself thinking seriously about truncating my blog posts. I would hate to lose readers as a result of taking that step, but I’m also not happy to find my photos and content copied onto other sites without permission.

So starting tomorrow morning I’m going to try out truncating my posts somewhat. I hope you’ll stick around and click through to read and comment.