When I got a Google Alert that my name appeared in an article on NFL jerseys, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Perhaps a reference to one of my social media super bowl posts?
Nope! Instead it seems I’d been given the honor of being in the first sentence of a spam article that had scraped together a bunch of random content.
I’m not going to link to it but it was on a subdomain of bloglines.co.za.
I guess you have to admire the automated attempt to transition from enterprise social media strategies to buying NFL replica jerseys:
And at least the advertisement was well targeted to me since I’m interested in press release optimization and I’m a fan of PRWeb. 
I also liked the ambitious effort to close the article with some extra links for buying property in Africa:
I even got rolled into a tweet promoting the article:
Jokes aside, it’s understandable how frustrated publishers and bloggers get with content scraping and article spinning. It really is an epidemic.
I’m getting tweets now too that say HEY! @franirwin! I quoted you in an article! Then I go check the link and it’s a scraped tweet as a no-follow link in a machine-written article. Gee, thanks!
Ha ha, yes that is bad Fran!