I’m glad that you liked the article, after re-reading it I realized that my tone was more harsh than intended. I really do love the plugin and, though it has some weaknesses, I think it’s VERY valuable, especially considering it was just at Beta 1 when I wrote about it.

While this plugin is only as strong as search engines’ ability to index splogs, sites that don’t get indexed probably aren’t that important in the big picture. Can it be easy to make money splogging if you aren’t in the major indexes? I think not, but I could be wrong.

Sadly, yes. Other alternatives do exist including comment/trackback spam and spam pinging. Granted, you are correct that a splog would be MUCH less effective without a good search engine presence, I still don’t want my content appearing on links pointed to by comment spammers.

You are right that those without a search engine presence are much less important, I’m just not quite ready to completely ignore the ones without. Besides, the best solution is to detect theft before it hits the search engines, especially Google, to avoid potential penalties.

As to adding a tracking image, the main splogs I am familiar with remove links and images (A HREF and IMG) leaving only the text. Wouldn’t this render tracking images useless?

Very true. I guess I should have thought that one through better. The ideal solution would probably be tracking the feed page itself. Since most sploggers host their apps on their server, it could easily be distinguished from normal uses.

Its not clear to me if FeedBurner does anything at all other than report ‘uncommon usage’. I can’t block IPs using FeedBurner, and I lose a substantial amount of control over the feed

I talked with FB about this shortly after my article on cloaking to stop scraping. I was told that they were going to look into something similar for them. No word yet. It takes a while to develop these kinds of features.

As far as the splog goes, email FeedBurner tech support about it. Let them know and they’ll track it down. If you can do that, you’ll improve the metrics for everyone. I, personally, have not encountered this problem (I’ve had a few scrape my summaries via Technorati feeds) so I can’t comment.

I don’t think the solution is to quit FeedBurner, but rather, to use it in tandem with your plugin. The more layers, the better.

Awareness is always the first step.

Well put! I agree there one hundred percent.

Thank you for the wonderful plugin and the update!