Four Steps to Combat Website Plagiarism
Publishing your website can be one of the most exciting
times for a business owner. After all of your hard work
and persistence, the whole world now has access to your
products or services. You have either paid hundreds of
dollars to have someone write your site content for you, or
you have put your heart and soul (not to mention hour upon
hour of hard work) into creating content of which you can
be proud. In either case, you’ve invested time
and/or money into your website copy. Now that it is out
there for the whole world to see, it may be a target for
all kinds of unscrupulous individuals. Read more »

If you have fallen victim to web ‘scrapers’ you will know how annoying and frustrating this can be. You spend time researching and writing blog posts, only to find that someone is systematically scraping them and publishing them to their own website or blog as if they had written the original article. This has happened to me more than once, so I was very pleased to find the ‘RSS Footer Plugin’ for WordPress Blogs. The way it works – the people who want to scrape your posts use your RSS Feed to automate the process. This plugin allows you to add a line of content either at the beginning or the end of your RSS feed articles: you can also Include a link back to the post, with post title as anchor text too. That is an aspect of this plugin that will really frustrate the web scrapers and, hopefully, make it pointless for them to plagiarise your original blog posts.

The last few days have seen a lot of activity by Joel Comm, author of the highly acclaimed ‘Adsense Secrets’ eBook. This valuable guide shows you step-by-step how to make the maximum legitimate earnings from your website or blogs. The Fourth Edition of Adsense Secrets has just been published and I recommend it highly. I have been reviewing Joel’s products for more than two years and generally they are written to an extremely high standard. Today, however, I followed another link to the latest eBook which offered a free guide entitled ‘How to set up a profitable website fast’. Ever-curious, I signed up for a download in the hope that there might be a technique that was new to me.

What I read was a really disappointing, out-of-date book that included many ‘recommended products’ that would get your new website banned faster than you can say ‘profitable website’. The first link I noticed was to sofware called ‘BlogBurner’ that promised to create and post customised keyword-rich content to your blog dozens of times a day. When I followed the link all I found was one of those free blogging sites that hosts a blog for you on their domain and promises to pay you 1c for a page view.

On page 67 Joel points to a resource for web content free of copyright (because it was published before 1921) called ‘the Lost Files’. Follow the link and you will see this message:

The Lost Files Has Closed Its Doors!
All Billing Has Been Discontinued.

Never mind, let’s try something else: next, a content aggregator site called completrss.com. Call that up and you will find a parked page because someone forgot to renew the domain registration. I know this, because one of my domains lapsed last year and the same page appeared.

There is a very long section on RSS feeds that I found quite confusing, and I use RSS myself. But here again I noticed a resource that was new to me – feedster. Search for Feedster and you will find the service has been moribund for well over one year.

Another software recommendation that is mentioned twice in the book is called Traffic Equalizer. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in this ebook: Traffic Equalizer takes or `scrapes` content from an outside source such for publication on your site as so-called fresh web content. There are numerous stories of sites being banned after employing this software and rightly so. I have been the victim of content scraping and I condemn this misuse of other people’s intellectual property.

Chapter 25 concentrates on cloaking techniques and redirects: if you want your site to remain indexed in Google, do not use either of these techniques – and do not use doorway pages, which are also mentioned earlier in the book. I could go on, but I have to go and do something productive.

Anyway, my conclusion – buy Adsense Secrets 4 and you will do very well. Ignore ‘Build a Profitable Website Fast’ if you want to stay in business.

Get paid to blog by Google – it is pretty simple, really. If you have an interesting blog you can use Adsense ads to give your readers more informtion on your chosen blog topic. There is now an updated version of Joel Comm’s excellent Adsense Secrets ebook at the rock bottom price of $9.95 for immediate download. I bought a copy of the previous version of this ebook, which was an essential for any blogger with amibtions of starting to get paid for blogging. I paid $97 for Adsense Secrets 3! Get the best bargain of the year now and start making more money from your blog.

If you are using WordPress on your own server or your web host’s server, then you have probably upgraded recently to WordPress Version 2.5. I am generally pleased with this upgrade so far, and it appears to work well with my existing plugins – except the Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin. When I reviewed this Plugin for WordPress last Autumn I was happy with its performance but then there were several mini upgrades of WordPress software that were incompatible with this plugin. The author of the Plugin offered some extra code on her website but when I tried to use this my sudebar content disappeared with a ‘parse error’ message. Unfortunately Lucia, the writer of the plugin, has not updated her blog for several months now and the Plugin no longer serves to Hide Sponsored Categories. So there appears to be no ongoing support for the plugin. For the moment I have deactivated it until I find another. When I searched for more plugins to serve this purpose, one of the top results was a link to my own blog post – I must be doing something right, then!

Just to remind you of the reason for using this plugin: many bloggers – like me – use lots of different categories for their blog posts, as a kind of filing system. Readers of the blog really want to see the most interesting categories and this plugin promised the facility of keeping outdated or less interesting categories out of the sidebar list.

Update – 15 June.  The Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin is no longer being supported and is not compatible with the most recent WordPress software updates so I have removed it from my WordPress Dashboard.

I went across to Bloggerwave today to see whetehr there were any posting opportunities for the blogs I registered at the site (this blog does not carry paid posts). It has been a long time since I had any assignments for Bloggerwave – in fact, it was last December. Every time I checked since then there were no offers for blog reviews. Today there was a new posting opportunity, paying $10, for short posts on tow of my blogs. I quickly accepted them before they could be taken by other bloggers: there is always a limit on the budget so you need to act fast. Read more »