Mike Seiler . com

If George & Cindy Anthony ever decide to murder their child, I’ll happily toss a free “Not Guilty” their way if I’m on the jury.

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Bitacle.org gets my vote for the Dirtbag of the Year award. Scraping is bad enough, but Bitacle is stealing content, putting their own copyright on it, injecting it with their Adsense, adding comment forms that submit to their site and generally just doing whatever they can do to make it look like it’s theirs. They even added the buttons to Digg it as theirs.

They’re already making a lot of friends.

Yesterday, they were modifying the content and putting their Adsense in the middle of the stolen articles, but today it looks like they moved it to the top of the page, with two more ad units at the bottom.

The site: command shows 995,000 pages indexed in Google. Hopefully, they’ll handle this and change it to zero, as well as yank the Adsense account.

What to do if they steal your content? You probably won’t have much luck getting them to take it down… but you could probably send an email to adsense-abuse@google.com and let them know what’s going on, as well as fill out the Google spam complaint form.

Other ideas:

• Block them (or mess with them) using .htaccess, redirects, etc.
• Trash their version of your site with the comment form they added. Maybe start off by posting a message that it’s stolen content, advise readers to report it, then go ahead and give yourself a link to your site.
• I believe they steal images, too. If they’re hotlinking your images, you could show something different when loaded from their site. I’d recommend something offensive that breaks Adsense’s TOS… then report that violation.
• I added some code to the header that checks to see if people are referred from there. If so, they get a message about the Bitacle dirtbags, advice to report them, then a link to this post.

I’ll probably update/edit this later–I just wanted to get something up, so I’d have something to redirect to.

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