No, not your shoe, although it almost feels like that!
It’s a new internet word I’ve become familiar with this week. Well, it’s probably not “new,” but it’s a new one on me. My Beloved and I got a bit of an education. See, he sometimes links to me in his posts, just as I often link to him. Hey, we’re married, it’s what we do. 
For those of you not in the know, like me, scraping is what it’s called when bogus internet sites take your entire post, copy them, then paste them onto their own sites without giving you an ounce of credit or asking your permission. Most of them tend to be sites that sell stuff – the ones I’ve seen have been sites for that ED drug that has those lame commercials that use the Elvis song, Viva Las Vegas. So there’s lots of porn and sex links on their sites too. We never would have known about it but I got the pingbacks on my site due to the links that Darc had used to me in his posts. Yep, it’s Darc that’s been scraped, big time. Actually, I have a tiny problem with the word "scraped" because it’s blatant plagiarism, pure and simple.
So off to the forums we go to find out as much as we can as to what we can do. Turns out … not a whole lot. That’s pretty discouraging. Turns out a lot of sites that scrape are based in other countries so it’s really hard to track them down. Then you have to find out who’s hosting the domain and stuff like that. One thing that you CAN do though, is if the bogus site is using Google Adsense you can petition Google and they’ll pull the site’s ads – no ads, no business, no reason to scrape anymore … until they set up another site and start all over again. Sigh. Heavy sigh. So if you blog it’s a fact of life you’ll probably get scraped at some point in time. The only way you’ll know is if you create a pingback to your site – like I’m doing right now with this nifty little tag I made –>>©DarcsFalcon. Pretty cool, huh? I downloaded a Text Template plug-in for my beloved Windows Live Writer and copied the HTML in there so all I have to do is click a link to insert it – same with the other tag I found –>>
. Like it? Me too! You can find several types of banners in different sizes and colors over at CopyScape. The home page has a search to see if your blog’s been scraped. The link for the banners is here. You can also buy premium searches if you’re willing to spend the money. (I also used the Insert Symbol plug-in.)
I found a site called Stolen Content that also has a lot of information. If you know the name of the domain that’s scraped you, you can type that into their search box to see what information they have on it, along with contact info and suggestions for how to deal with it if you so choose. They do a lot of the grunt work so you don’t have to. Be sure to check out their FAQ page. No doubt you can also do an internet search using your favorite engine (mine is Search) with "scraping" as your search term and find out lots of stuff.
One thing you can do is to make sure your blog feeds only an excerpt from your post, and not the full post. The above banners may help, as well.
So enough about that!
In other news, our ISP is making a visit tomorrow so hopefully we’ll have this connection problem taken care of. I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is to have every page I visit time out 5 times in a row! I’ve spent more time watching the little "loading" thing than I’ve ever spent in a check-out line! They’ve been doing some upgrading recently and when I called, they told me our modem had an incredibly weak signal, so I think the re-furbed modem we got last time we called 2 mo’s ago about another problem wasn’t up to the upgrades. That’s my thought anyway, internet connection wizard that I am. *cough* I did download a nifty little add-on for FireFox that re-loads the pages for me so I don’t have to sit there clicking the refresh button all the time, but still – I’ve had better dial-up service! The add-on I got is called "Try Again." Try it! It works! In addition to that, I have NEWS to tell you about another add-on for FireFox I’ve mentioned recently, that I’ll share with you on Tuesday. 
Related articles by Zemanta
>
My Logo :D, made by 
