Thieves in the temple  

This is totally bizarre. I've heard of sites that mirror your content so that it can be viewed anonymously (although I'm a little hazy on the details of how even that works), but this altered mirror of my sister's travel magazine The Long Trip Home looks like out-and-out content theft. The domain registration information is available from WHOIS, so I've suggested to Jackie that she contact the registrant and raise hell. But does anybody else have a thought on 1) what the aim of stealing this content might have been or 2) how to deal with it? If so, please email me.

MORE: From Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today:

I'm not sure what this person hopes to gain from this particular infringement. While there are some advertisements to be found, including the dollar search box at the foot of the home page, I don't think that's enough to recoup costs. I could be wrong, but I think that it's possible this is a site in evolution, starting out with a completely ripped off version of your sister's page and morphing it over time with more adds, hopefully, new content. However, that doesn't seem likely as the domain was registered almost a year ago, plenty of time to have moved on.

Instead, I have a feeling this has to do with search engine warfare. He's using your sister's layout and conent, probably because she was ranked high for some good terms, to generate search results and "respect" for this site. As this site moves up in the search engine standings, he'll probably link to another site of his, one loaded with either ads or some kind of sales pitch in hopes of raising that in the rankings as well. It's a sneaky game where you steal content to get Google's attention, but it does work. Do a search for the term "splogging" and you'll see what I mean.