Ugh...100+ posts stolen

[kirbybowl]

I found out today, another blog (on blogger) is stealing my posts. Currently, they've stolen 100+ posts almost exactly and have removed my url within posts, removed links to my Flickr account, and didn't bother changing any text...

What's even worse, is since it's blogspot, they have higher priority on google than my site (since I have PR 0 at the moment after switching domain 3 months ago)

Seriously...I've seen people steal some of my posts before, but to steal more than 100 is just massively frustrating

[QuirkyJessi]

Have you turned them in yet?

[Bloggeries]

Report them to the blogger anti-spam team. They'll be on that in a jiffy. Don't fret!

[kirbybowl]

Thanks for the reply, I didn't know Blogger had a report spam feature. I have reported that site.

I guess that's the big problem with not hosting images on your domain (although for photo blogs, it would be costly) otherwise you could restrict hotlinking of photos and at least make it more difficult for them to steal...

If that person was using my photobucket images, I definitely would have modified some images to get them kicked off of adsense and blogger (yes, I'm that bitter)

[Bloggeries]

It's best to host the images on your own blog just make them web quailty. Reason being ... Why do you think flickr and all those networks want to host your images free? Are they just saints? It's for the image traffic. If you host it on Flickr it's Flickr that gets the traffic not your site.

EverythingEverywhere who is a member here had to manually change them alll back. Quite the feat I'm sure.

Best of luck and keep us posted,

[kirbybowl]

Originally Posted by Bloggeries

It's best to host the images on your own blog just make them web quailty. Reason being ... Why do you think flickr and all those networks want to host your images free? Are they just saints? It's for the image traffic. If you host it on Flickr it's Flickr that gets the traffic not your site.

EverythingEverywhere who is a member here had to manually change them alll back. Quite the feat I'm sure.

Best of luck and keep us posted,

I use Flickr to post selected images with links to the post. It's like a sample. It works out quite well since Flickr brings in a lot of referrals.

I pay for photobucket pro as an alternate mirror for images since it includes my site name in the url (unlike blogger), so I often get searches for my site name on google and yahoo when people hotlink my photos.

[rjleaman]

Originally Posted by kirbybowl

I use Flickr to post selected images with links to the post. It's like a sample. It works out quite well since Flickr brings in a lot of referrals.

Good tip there, kirbybowl - I know my blogs get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search, and I seem to spend a fair amount of time browsing around Flickr just for fun (and clicking around to learn more about an interesting photographer, quite often) but never put the two things together in my mind... must think about how to use images more effectively!

I don't think it matters where you host your images from the point of view of a content thief, though - if someone is going to rip off your posts, they're most likely just to grab the RSS feed. And most of those scraper blogs don't care too much about pics, they just need your words to get indexed and bring in the click-through traffic for their ads.

On the other hand, self-hosting images means you have the security of knowing you won't lose them (or have to change a pile of links) if one service or another goes out of business or changes its TOS to something that you don't want to live with.

Just my 2 cents...

[kirbybowl]

Originally Posted by rjleaman

Good tip there, kirbybowl - I know my blogs get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search, and I seem to spend a fair amount of time browsing around Flickr just for fun (and clicking around to learn more about an interesting photographer, quite often) but never put the two things together in my mind... must think about how to use images more effectively!

I don't think it matters where you host your images from the point of view of a content thief, though - if someone is going to rip off your posts, they're most likely just to grab the RSS feed. And most of those scraper blogs don't care too much about pics, they just need your words to get indexed and bring in the click-through traffic for their ads.

On the other hand, self-hosting images means you have the security of knowing you won't lose them (or have to change a pile of links) if one service or another goes out of business or changes its TOS to something that you don't want to live with.

Just my 2 cents...

Google image brings in very inconsistent referrals in my opinion because it really depends on chance whether you get indexed or not. I have seen photo blogs go from over 3000 UV a day due to google image referrals one week and then fall to under 300 UV a day when their image is no longer listed in the first few pages. Flickr brings in fairly consistent traffic if you submit images to groups or have people linking to your photos (e.g. Blog This feature in Flickr).

As for RSS feeds, I use a truncated RSS feed (as a blogspot option), so none of my photos show up in the feed and only the first 250 words show up...it would be a bit too easy to steal photos off a feed and it really gives no incentive for users to visit my blog. I suppose if I didn't care about topsite ranks or ads I would use full RSS feed...

Hosting images is always better, but I can't afford the bandwidth costs atm. Photobucket is currently around 200 GB/month (probably b/c ppl hotlink) and only makes up around 10% of the photos on my site (I use blogger's hosting by default). I suppose I could always get host gator's hosting, but it really depends on how well this site does in the coming months.

[rjleaman]

Originally Posted by kirbybowl

As for RSS feeds, I use a truncated RSS feed (as a blogspot option), so none of my photos show up in the feed and only the first 250 words show up...it would be a bit too easy to steal photos off a feed and it really gives no incentive for users to visit my blog. I suppose if I didn't care about topsite ranks or ads I would use full RSS feed...

I used to use truncated feeds for DomestikGoddess.com but found that my subscriber numbers just flatlined after a while. As soon as I started publishing full feeds, there was a dramatic increase - and I can't explain why, because it seems counter-intuitive, but there was also a dramatic increase in ad revenue when I went to full feed.

Humorously, shortly after I read your story about the 100 stolen posts yesterday, I checked my FeedBurner stats for 'uncommon uses' and found another scraper site that was publishing my RSS feed, pictures (hosted by me) and all. :icon_twisted: Blood pressure started to rise...

Yes, like you, I'm really ticked off by a site using my words and my pics (and my paid-for-with-hard-earned-cash bandwidth) for their own profit.

It especially ticks me off that this site (and we're not talking about a tiny rinky-dink scraper on blogspot but one with some money behind it) even goes to the trouble to strip out the RSS Footer (Wordpress plugin) link back to my side that's included in my feed. If that's not a tacit admission of deliberate content theft, well, I'll be my own Aunt Fanny!

But I've already done this rant... and know exactly what actions to take. So, this weekend's fun will involve a cease-and-desist letter... and, more to the point, a content-theft complaint made directly to the site's big advertisers. :icon_twisted: That is so amazingly effective - hit 'em in the wallet!

[Bloggeries]

I add an image into each bloggery I make in the blog reviews. It arguably gets most of its traffic from images.