Avoid Paperblog! – Stopping, Removing, & Deleting Your Content From paperblog

In the course of a normal day on mybeerbuzz.com, I’m continuously surprised at what “crap” I come across.  The dark side of creating a website and populating that website is constantly hitting me over the head, and you’d probably not be surprised at the one theme common to all of them; Using the content I spend hours creating to generate profit for someone else.”

I’ve seen tons of content “borrowed” from my site and used without any attribution or linking back.  Text, (typos included), images….you name it, people steal it for their own profit.  I currently track this and I was frightened to see that I average over 1000 content copies a week with just four (Yes just 4!) links back from those copies.

But just when you think you’ve seen it all, enter paperblog.  Now I’ll admit I have no recollection of signing up for paperblog, and no record of a password to login, but a password reset with MY e-mail address gained me access….and here’s what they do.

Using my RSS feed, they pull my FULL content (text and images) and post it on their sites with THEIR advertising wrapped around it.  Even more maddening, is that when you click “Read More” the link goes to THEIR site and not mine.  In fact you have to work pretty hard to even find a way to get to my site from paperblog.  I’d have less of a problem if they posted the first few sentences of my content on their site, and “Read Me” would link to my site…but NO…they take it all.

So at this point you may be asking yourself why this would be bad?  After all, maybe you’re just starting out and you want/need traffic?  Well guess what….after checking and re-checking, with tens of thousands of posts on my site also posted on their site, I’ve received 17 views coming from paperblog!  They simply do NOT send ANY traffic back.

As if that’s not enough fun, because paperblog posts many many sites for different languages (English=en.paperblog.com), they will actually outrank YOU on a Google search for YOUR OWN content, and sometimes even to the point that YOUR content gets removed form search results as a duplicate!  In other words, the harder your work, the more they profit and the more you get pushed onto page 28 of a Google search.

With that in mind I decided to see how to stop this madness.  First off I requested my password, reset my password and logged in.  Searching through their help and googling on my own, I came across an obscure option in their Contact Us form to Terminate My Account.  I’ve done considerable follow up and I can report that after requesting they drop my feed, it does appear as though my new articles are not being posted.  I’m not 100% ready to commit on this since I don’t know what their update frequency is and so far they have NOT replied to any of my requests/messages…so stay tuned.  After reading a few posts on-line, I did also message them in English and French…so we’ll see.

My next issue is getting paperblog to REMOVE MY OLD CONTENT.  I’ve now requested they do so, but a simple search still shows my old posts and historical content from YEARS of posting and as recently as last week, are STILL showing on paperblog.

Stay tuned as I plan to tag paperblog in this post to get some answers.  I will update this post with their response and with my experience trying to remove my feed AND my historical content.

Morale of the story, DON’T give anyone the right or ability to profit from your hard work, constantly watch to be sure someone isn’t doing it without your permission, and do whatever it takes to STOP IT!

UPDATE:  Over a week has passed.  paperblog has not responded to any of my messages and paperblog has NOT removed my content from their site!

UPDATE 2 SEP 2015:  It’s now closing on two weeks from our original contact.  I have now sent a total of 5 messages, including tagging @paperblog on Twitter.  While it would appear as though my feed is no longer updating….ALL of my older posts (dating from 8/21/2015 back) are still appearing.  I have contacted them again today (in English and French) with no reply.

14 Sept 2015:  With much persistence on my part and zero response or confirmation on their part, it is now looking like paperblog may have finally removed my content form their site.  There are still some zombie Google/search engine responses that link to stories that have been deleted, but even they seem to be slowly disappearing.  I’m still checking and I have no idea whether it was my messages on their site, on Twitter or on Facebook that ultimately did the trick.