Seems that MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland is facing black hat blogger problems herself.
The Queen of the Case Study has been having her proprietary content lifted by bloggers, as she's discovered via her weekly Technorati searches.
According to Anne, her thieves are falling into two camps - the overly enthusiastic fans who don't realize they're guilty of copyright infringement when they "share" her content, and the black hats.
The black hats, she claims, are "profit-driven, generally seeking Google AdSense revenue. They publish as many blogs as possible populated with lifted content, and sit back to collect commission checks from Google on ad clicks. Some have created automated programs that suck up content from around the Web and post it without need for a human editor."
It's a similar scheme to the one we've seen on other blogs, the ones that exist only to boost rankings and drive traffic to another main site.
This is the dark side of blogging. This is a channel that has a lot of potential...and it's being exploited by the same ugly breed of marketers that have given us spyware and spam.
Read the whole article on MarketingSherpa. (May be for-fee after 7/28. And no, we don't get a cut!)
....and by the way, we had express permission from MarketingSherpa to include that article quote. It's just too hot a day to deal with a 'Cease and Desist.'
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