Before I left for a week in sunny Southern California, the content of my blog, other garden blogs, as well as garden magazines was scraped off (stolen) by another website. With the help of fellow bloggers and big corporations, the battle was won! Here's how:
Carolyn at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago was the first to let me know about the content theft. Thank you Carolyn!
I posted a story about the theft and contacted Google via some instructions posted on ProBlogger (link provided by fellow blogger at Secrets of a Seed Scatterer). Thank you, ProBlogger and Nell Jean!
I also contacted, and received a response from, The Home Depot®. The thieving website was also misusing that company's name in order to steal page ranking from them as well as my garden blog. They were happy to know and joined the battle. Thank you, Home Depot!
Meanwhile, rather than writing new content to be stolen, I reposted past stories (scheduled to post during my absence) and turned off comments and gadgets to subscribe to my blog with RSS feeds. Since I was away on vacation to have fun, I didn't want to deal with more drama!
I did have my iPod Touch with me, so I was able to check on the progress of the battle against the content thieves.
Due to the efforts of Google™, the website no longer has our content and with a little indexing wizardry, that url redirects to the legitimate website of The Home Depot.
Google, who owns Feedburner and Blogger, apparently blocked the IP address of the thieves so that they couldn't scrape content off of my blog. I imagine that they probably blocked that IP address for all feeds and blogs under their power. Thank you, Google!
To make sure that your blog posts are always attributed to your blog, I recommend that you "sign" the post with your blog name. I have been adding my name to my posts for well over a year and am now including a hyperlink back to my blog. It is easy to create a hyperlink:
- Write your blog name at the end of your post (i.e. Defining Your Home, Garden and Travel)
- Highlight the blog name
- Click on the "link" icon in your editor (it looks like a chain link in Blogger)
- Type the url address of your blog (i.e., http://definingyourhome.blogspot.com) in the link box
You can also include the information in your blog template so that you don't have to always remember to add the information to each post... and, I'll tell you how to do that in my next blog post!
Words and photos by Freda Cameron, Defining Your Home, Garden and Travel. All other company or product or patented names mentioned are registered trademarks/copyrights/patents owned by those respective companies or persons.
