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Someone is copying my site content! What can I do?


Kaos

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Hi folks,

This looks like the place to be.

Apologies for my abrupt post but I have recently found out that someone is copying blogs from my site and posting them on their own blog, 99% word for word! Some of the text has been translated.

I have a Wordpress blog site and noticed the link in a section of the admin area that shows you links backlinks.

I couldn't believe it when I clicked on the link.

Obviously this is not good when it comes to search engines as it will be classed as duplicate content.

Is there anything I can do to combat these thiefs?

Here is my site...

http://www.dreamboxtips.com

...and here is the affending site...

http://www.linuxinside.onets.pl/2008/04/16...rect-recording/

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Kaos

P.S. My activation email from the site went into my Bulk folder (spam) in my yahoo account lol

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Is there anything I can do to combat these thiefs?
Hmm...this may not necessarily be the right place, most of us here are in the e-mail spam business (oops, make that ANTI-e-mail spam business), SpamCop itself doesn't have much to do with blog spam or suchlike.

However, having run a website for donkey's years, I feel qualified to formally welcome you to the den of intellectual property theft that is the web (and the blogosphere in particular).

There is not much way to stop someone from copy-pasting text from your site to their own. Likewise, there's no way to stop them downloading pictures from your site and copying them up to theirs. If this bothers you, you may need to consider whether you want to post the info at all.

You can put copyright notices on your site, although I grant that this provides very little protection these days.

You do possibly have some options to prevent people from linking to your images directly from their sites (which, in some cases, can run up your own hosting bills). If you have some expertise with Apache, and the necessary permissions on your blog site, it is possible to set up directives in an .htaccess file that will tell the server not to send pictures (or other files) if the referring URL is not from your own domain. I found that this keeps the usual eBay/MySpace crowd from linking directly to my pics from their pages. For example, here's what I use (domain is disguised):

RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER) !^http://(www\.)?your-domain-here\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER) !^$
RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER) ^http://.*$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F]

If your site is protected in this way, and someone puts a link to a pic from your site directly into their own page, they (and their visitors) will see a big blank space.

You can also be nasty and switch pictures (i.e. substitute another image file with the same name), so instead of seeing a computer menu or suchlike, they might see Hello Kitty (or something even worse). You can rename the original pic and then update your own HTML to keep your site correct. I have busted numerous eBay sellers in this fashion. Once, I changed the background of some bad-ass MySpace guy's page to Barney the Dinosaur, and he stayed up there for weeks.

Wordpress may offer some additional protections (or may for example automate the RewriteCond gambit), but you would have to find someone who knows it better than I.

-- rick

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Hi Rick,

Sorry for bursting my way into the forum without accurately analysing it's content. I was so mad I wasn't seeing straight and all I seen was spam Reporting lol.

But thanks for taking the time to reply, I really appreciate it.

I'll try and impliment the .htaccess mod, that's a good tip.

Thanks

Kaos

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This looks like the place to be.

P.S. My activation email from the site went into my Bulk folder (spam) in my yahoo account lol

No, this Forum secrion is defined as;

SpamCop Reporting Help

A forum to help users with reporting spam using the SpamCop Parsing and Reporting Service. Questions about the SpamCop Email System and/or Accounts should be directed to the SpamCop Email System & Accounts Forum. Questions about "your e-mail Blocked by SpamCop" should be directed to the SpamCop Blocklist Help Forum. Etc. etc., etc.

As such, this Topic will be moved to the Lounge with this post.

The location of the activation e-mail is address in the Forum FAQ among other places. There are folks that use some strange filtering parameters, some even as silly as seeing the word 'spam' in the e-mail.

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