Working at Home on the Internet

Dealing With Content Scrapers

Last week I found yet another Scraper Scraping my RSS Feed. The way I found it? Google Alerts.

As I mentioned long ago, I check for Work at Home topics , to see what is happening in the world of Home Business and just to keep current overall about the subject.

I found something that looked familiar, yet somehow strange. I saw a caption from my post “This Weeks Helpful Reads… Week 68” except for one thing. It was posted on someone elses Blog. Their URL. Their everything.

I went to the actual Blog and the only thing there was my full post including good ole Albert and Lots and Lots of AdSense Ads. There was a link to a Free Money Making site listed in the “Home” section.

I located a Contact form there to apply for a Free AdSense site and sent a fairly nasty eMail. I Told, not Asked, them to take the Fake Site Down or I would take whatever steps necessary to get them to comply.

Fortunately, the complied and the site (at least that particular one) was taken down within a couple of days.

So my suggestion to you would be to find a way to follow your own posts through some type of Keyword Tracking. As I mentioned, I use Google Alerts. And when you find something that is being scraped, contact them or their host system if you can find it.

Don’t let the Scrapers get away with Stealing Your Content!

New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!

September 5th, 2007 at 01:24pm | Posted by Joe | RSS, Rants, Scams and Legitimate | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

Newest Technorati Changes Screw Up WordPress Inbound Links

 Is it just my imagination or what?

Technorati once again changed their landing page. I’m not going to say anything about whether their recent changes affected my “Rank”. But, I will say just today (since the newest change) my WordPress Dashboard does NOT Show my Incoming Links. T-rati is where WP gets the stats for links in.

Why do these sites change things that work just fine? Doesn’t the old addage say… ” If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

Note to Technorati…

STOP Changing things that work just fine, when you do, you BREAK something else…

Has anyone else noticed this problem? Let me know, we may have to start a petition to Stop Changing Things…

Update: It seems the Incoming Links are back after almost 2 hours. Maybe they were just updating something, but they WERE missing on 2 of my WP Blogs, I kept checking!

Technorati Tags: Technorati, WordPress

July 6th, 2007 at 12:48pm | Posted by Joe | Rants, WordPress | 3 reader remarks | Print This Post

Don’t Wait Until Spammers and Hackers Overwhelm Your Site

Beware Rant Ahead… 

Your IP has been blocked. Oh, that’s right you can’t see this post because YOUR IP HAS BEEN BLOCKED!

Why in the world anyone from Egypt would want to access MY Hard Drive is beyond me except to use My IP to do something Illegal.

This is not the first time I have had to block an IP address, the last time was when I had my Whole URL Hacked back in mid April.

Why, you may ask did I wait until there were 5 visits from the same IP? Up until last week, StatCounter had a default of 100 PageViews in the Log for a standard account. They just raised the default to 500 PV’s and I picked it up as I was going over the additional views for comparison of stats over a longer period.

Normally, I am not really a suspicious person, but it seems that waiting too long to confront a small problem can end up becoming a real big problem in the end. So, I decided to take action in order to avoid the possibility of being Hacked again.

If I see people/bots trying to access anything that they shouldn’t have access to, I will confront them and stop them any way I can. I will not tolerate misuse of ANY of my Sites or Equipment in any way.

For examples of the problems I have already had with Spammers and Hackers I have included links below for your reference.

Related Posts:

7 Steps I’ve Tried to Stop E-Mail Address Hacking

Blogging Tip #12-BackUp (when my entire URL was Hacked)

My advice to you… Don’t wait until things get out of hand. Take on the Spammers and Hackers as Soon as you discover they are attacking you.

June 6th, 2007 at 01:26pm | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Rants | reader remarks | Print This Post