Plagiarism & Spam

Jamie just emailed me with a comment:

“Did this person have permission to copy our information, word for word? The author seems to have credited himself when all he did was cut and paste the information that Metamend owns. He didn’t even take out our company name. http://whatiscloaking (dot ) blogspot.com/ word for word from http://www.metamend.com/what-is-cloaking.html Not sure what can be done since it’s a blog and all.”

When I saw the note I thought: Kind of ironic, this type of issue just came up over coffee this morning. So when Jamie emailed me at first I thought; just more blog spam; people reprint everything etc… just to get spam links. I don’t care when people reprint articles; just include a link back. (and don’t add your name as an author!)

But then I looked at it: The header says “By Imran Hashmi, October 28, 2005″ WHO? Never heard of him. Then I looked at the article it includes the phrase “We are proud to say that Metamend has not, nor will it ever look at a search engine optimization strategy that involves deceiving the search engines. Metamend finds it to be unethical, and not meeting with the standards that our clients would hold us to. It is a type of search engine spam. ” Again – WHO is this guy? definitely not part of our company.

So here’s his bio – maybe someone will DIGG or Slashdot this just to fulfill this “losers” desire to become famous… (wouldn’t that be a hoot) As an aside, I’ll see if we get any search engine traffic from around the world on this loser’s name “Imran Hashmi” – I’ll post some Enquisite data on it; if any traffic for his name does ever occur. (It’ll probably all come from Burnley, UK!)

Imran Hashmi ( محمدعمران ہاشمی )
Location:Burnley, Lancashire, United Kingdom
This website will tell you little about me, my Interests and what I do for living. I completed my BS from AJK University in 1999. I passed MCP NT 4.0, MCP Windows 2000, MCSA Windows 2000,E-Commerce, A+ from 1999 till 2003.
For the past 2 years I have worked as Senior Web Designer for well known companies in the UK. Since last few months I am self employed and really enjoying “Being own Boss”. Workin from the plate form of www.professionaldesigner (dot) co.uk Please contact me if you need any info. ”

Hmmmm…. based on this I suggest that AJK University review his papers for plagiarism – he’s obviously quite poor at it.

The really funny part – the article is from 2002 or 2003; It’s old, out of date, and yet, this goat was too stupid to clue into the fact: He’s so far behind, he thinks he’s ahead!

Oh well, some of the other articles he copied, and “published” under his own name are even older. Too funny! Poorly executed, bad splog.