ClearViewWhat?

I’ve suddenly been getting a lot of ping-backs lately to blog posts, which is slightly unusual — I don’t typically don’t have random unknown people linking to me. This evening I had three waiting for me; all pointed at my NYC 2008 post, each emphasizing a different subject: “where was the statue of liberty built” (which doesn’t even appear on my site), “schwarz nursery” (which is a reference to the doll nursery in FAO Schwarz) and “train simulator” (with some mangled text about National Train Day). The websites that all three ping-backs came from look exactly the same. For those of you who may have the same ping-backs, they are: mediacenternews.info, clearviewprint.info and clearviewnews.info. I didn’t make them linkable, because I don’t want you to click on them and give them traffic; but hopefully this post makes it into Google search results for those of you who run blogs and are wondering who these clowns are. Google has no clue who they are, and it appears that all three just started operating less than 2 weeks ago.

So, what are they? They’re blog aggregators. They automatically download RSS feeds and skim posts from thousands of blogs, and create links to them, hoping that the blog operators will be dumb enough to accept the ping-back. Why would they do that? Well, the more people you have linking to you, the more relevant your site becomes to Google in search results. So, thousands of ping-backs means thousands of links, which means that when someone searches for “statue of liberty” they will get my blog post on the scammer’s blog instead of mine. As their traffic rate goes up from these misdirected hits, they start selling advertising and making lots of money by ripping off everyone else’s content but never producing any of their own.

Five dollars says they send ping-backs for this post too. Wouldn’t that be funny?

Scum bags.

Update: Looks like I was wrong.  These are just three sites in a fleet of hundreds that scrape valid content off of the internet in the hopes of getting someone to click on a link and install a virus or trojan on their computer.  Lovely.  And to think that I just emailed the abuse department of their hosting provider — which turns out to be a Russian company that is probably owned by them.  Guess I’d better get ready to kiss my email account goodbye.

List of domains that are scraping my content (updated 05/30/2008) :

• clearviewnews.info
• clearviewprint.info
• clearviewtest.info
• mediacenternews.info
• netinfodigest.info

Hopefully Google picks this up so that other people who are trying to figure out who they are will get some answers too.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader.

Nothing Noteworthy | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice