Jalaj P. Jha

Some Copycats don’t use their brains, and some don’t have it like Ashwin Khanna. Ashwin Khanna by now is known in the Blogosphere for his fake $2500 contest created to get backlinks from contestants. Copycat is what he is not known till now.

I was impressed by the writing style of Ashwin Khanna and the posts on his blog did made me feel bad for him to get into the idea of holding a fake contest.

It was next that I decided to think the other way and made a search query on Google for “Here are 3 steps you can take to destroy your competition”, a line that exists in one of his post. And the search results revealed the truth that it was in-fact a word to word replica of original post at internetbusiness-tips.com posted a day before Ashwin Khanna did. Even the post title was not changed while reproducing.

Moral for Blog owners: Occasionally check for phrases from your valuable posts on Google to see if someone is ruthlessly reproducing your content without crediting you for it.

I could have gone searching on Google for rest of the posts, just then struck another thought. From another post by Ashwin, I followed a link to land up on a blog post at thefastlane.info. And I did saw what was anticipated. Though Ashwin Khanna had changed the post title, the similar texts included with pingbacks showed that the original post existed at steve-olson.com posted way back on 1st Nov 2006 more than 8 months before Ashwin’s. LOL Most Copycats are fool enough to enable pingbacks on their blog.

Request to Blog owners: If you notice a pingback that looks suspicious, please visit the linking post to verify if that comes from a Copycat’s blog and alert the original author for the same. A comment at original post would be enough.

Let all Bloggers stand united to drive Copycats out of the Blogosphere.

Why not Bloggers holding various contests/challenges take this idea for their next contest/challenge? Here are links to a few such Bloggers contestblogger, Internetducttape, Lorelle, ontopresults, blingonashoestringjewelry , waigs, dearcrissy, aruntheace, emonetized, bloggerforlife, dillydesigns, kristoferbrozio, buzzpatrol, nofactzone, netchick

PS : The last para of this blog have been removed following some blogs misunderstanding it. It held links to various contests pages giving a contest idea. Blog owners who insist that links to their post remain here may tell so from a comment.