Frankly, I'd rather worry about global warming - which we can do something about by voting for the right people and doing what we can on an individual basis. As far as the web is concerned, I'll go along with what Alex says - and also assume that the chances of anybody picking up my name on a screen-scraping search are (a) minimal, (b) out of my control, and (c) essentially irrelevant. It the editor has nothing better to do than search at that level, and simultaneously is too busy to check to see whether it means anything - screw it. There are a lot more quality magazines than I have poems, and the ones I know don't seem to play those games. I'm not going to lie awake at night worrying about it.

I found two of the first four poems I checked for. As I've said a couple of times, I used a simple Google search. Nothing fancy. The title and a couple of words from the first line. In both cases the poem appeared as the top result of the Google search. So, you can assume the chances are minimal if you like, but my (admittedly small) empirical research puts the odds at around 50%.
I'm not going to lie awake at night either, but I will be thinking about taking more precautions than I previously did, which won't be difficult, as previously I took none, thinking everything was completely hidden from the great god of Google.

best,

Matt

I'll lie awake. Not about this, other things mostly, but awake nonetheless.

Why get involved in deception, editors want poems that havn't been seen before, that's reasonable, don't submit poems that have already had a substantial readership on Erato or any other poetry forum or if you do be completely honest about it and say where it has appeared.

Well, I don't know about seen before, Ross. Unless the poems appear in a general Interest magazine like Quadrant or First Things or The Spectator or even, God save us, The Staggers,then they will scarcely have been seen at all.

When I'm judging a competition, I always Google-search the first few lines of the poems on my shortlist. Chiefly, I'm checking for plagiarism, though. (And protecting myself against the chancer who's tried to slip a Kipling past me.)

Editor-wise, I like what Ross says. "This poem is unpublished but has been presented for critique on a closed forum" sounds like a reasonable pre-emptive measure to me, though I feel that a journal who would object in principle to such a previous "appearance" should say so specifically in its guidelines to contributors.

And as an occasional contributor to the D&A forum, I draw your attention to the fact that measures had to be taken to further protect material from public scrutiny.

Would more frequent culling help?

John, that's the whole point, does 'seen' on Erato where 500-1500 readers will have read the poem constitute 'previously published' it depends on the venue, a small poetry ezine might consider it does, my point is just be honest, it's so much easier and if your poems are any good they will find their audience.

I admire your sagacity, Ross. But I don't really want to wait as long. as Emily or Gerard for a sniff at fame.

And there's the case of Thomas Traherne. It took three hundred years.

All,

In part, for me, this was prompted by Rattle announcing a change of rules to fall more in line with what they consider standard. Here's the Facebook post.

Here are couple of comments from the editor Tim Green in response to questions:

"I Google lines from every poem before publishing, so see if they've been published anywhere else."

"The rule of thumb is that if you can Google some of the lines and nothing comes up, then you're fine"

My concern is that two of the poems I've just sent him violate this rule of thumb as a result of rssing.com, which is frustrating as if it weren't for rssing.com we'd be completely hidden here on the Sphere. Most likely the fact the poems have been / will be pruned / gutted will be enough. I'll email him for clarification. Besides, I imagine he'll have plenty of poetry-related reasons to reject my poems and so never get around to searching for them anyway! :)

Alex,

I appreciate that asking a scraper to cease scraping may be more trouble than it's worth, or ineffective. Searching around I did come across this blogger who did ask them to desist (full text of his email in the comments) and then reported back that he was successful; they removed all stored data and stopped scraping him.

best,

Matt

Matt, I've always found Tim Green to be friendly and responsive to poets' questions and concerns. If you're following his Facebook posts, why not reply to that one and explain the problem? He's aware of Eratosphere and what we do here.

Or, how about this: give me an idea of when that post appeared and whether it was a Rattle post or a Tim Green post, and I'll raise the issue.

Editing back to add: A reasonable precaution is to avoid putting the real title of the poem in the title field. The site's front page is the one that's not protected from Google, and what's in the title field appears on the front page.