I was reviewing the SEO of my website and noticed a bot reposting my content verbatim in an egregious way. 😥

My last article -- VS Code Profiles - Manage configurations easily for different environments and workflows -- was reposted at https://www.codersjungle.com/2023/03/31/vs-code-profiles-manage-configurations-easily-for-different-environments-and-workflows/.

The canonical URL of the duplicated article is self referential. They want to claim ownership of the content for themselves! They want a boost in traffic from SEO. No surprise there!

The cherry on top is at the bottom of the article, it features an embedded YouTube video for a product called CYBERSEO PRO AI, a ChatGPT autoblogging WordPress plugin! 🤦‍♂️

I know that aggregration bots have been around for ages, and that they are hard to avoid, BUT is there a way to fight it without making my content less accessible?

I think it is just possible to add friction. If you make it harder, maybe they will stop.

On further inspection of the duplicated article, I noticed it includes the text "Source: https://dev.to/robole/vs-code-custom-workflows-and-project-configuration-with-profiles-2ib6" at the end. Why bother?

I cross-post to https://dev.to, maybe the bot is using the Dev.to API (Forem API) or maybe it scraps the page. The images are hotlinked to the dev.to files.

I will decide later if I will just accept this as a fact of life, or to reconsider syndication of my content.

Autoblogging - time to re-evaluate?

The CyberSEO autoblogging plugin got me thinking.

The description of the video (I won't link to it) says:

OpenAI GPT-3.5 has breathed new life into autoblogging. See how easy it is to make your own site, which is automatically populated with unique high-quality articles written by OpenAI artificial intelligence and illustrated images of any style created by DALL·E 2. With CyberSEO Pro plugin and OpenAI technologies (the plugin allows you to use the same GPT Turbo model as used by ChatGPT) you can populate your sites with high-quality content in any language and with any preset keywords on full autopilot!

Autopilot websites! 🤨

This type of application offers a more advanced type of content duplication than before. It appears that you can use it to add other people's content to a funnel, and use that content as a prompt for feeding to an AI model to generate similar text content, and a new cover image. That content could then be unique enough to be seen as a different source by search engines.

A person does not need to come up with a topic to blog about, or write anything. They merely have to find people who are active bloggers in particular area, and feed the plugin.

This is an area I am largely ignorant in. I really hope that is not something that happens.

It is a different kind of spam. I think it is good to re-evaluate things going forward.

Message to Coder's Jungle / CyberSEO

How many fingers am I holding up?

🖕🖕