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What I read was a really disappointing, out-of-date book that included many ‘recommended products’ that would get your new website banned faster than you can say ‘profitable website’.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.

If you have decided to move your blog from Blogger to WordPress, congratulations – using WordPress blogging software for a blog hosted on your own domain is the top choice for anyone who is serious about making money from blogging. This does not mean a wordpress.com blog, please understand that there is a big difference. If you set up a blog at WordPress.com the situation is really very similar to Blogger – you get free use of a space on THEIR domains and they can shut you down if you break the rules. One of the main rules at WordPress.com is that you cannot publish sponsored blog posts, so a blogger who wants to make money from writing paid reviews on their blog needs to use WordPress blog publishing system on your web host control panel. The good news is that major web hosting companies include the latest version of WordPress in your hosting package at no extra cost.

If you have spent a lot of time and effort writing posts on your existing Blogger Blogspot blog, then you will probably want to take them with you and it is fairly simple to do this.

Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on to ‘manage’ – you will then see six different options, and one of these is ‘import’. Click on this and you will see the following information:

“If you have posts or comments in another system, WordPress can import those into this blog. To get started, choose a system to import from below:”

The first name on the list is ‘Blogger’. Click on this and you will see the following:

“Howdy! This importer allows you to import posts and comments from your Blogger account into your WordPress blog.

To use this importer, you must have a Google account, an upgraded (New, was Beta) blog, and it must be on blogspot or a custom domain”

Then you will be asked to authorise access to your blogger account and your WordPress blog publisher will bring all your existing blog posts across to your new domain.

Note: once you are happy with the published posts on your new blog it is a good idea to delete the existing posts from the old blog or you could be penalised for duplicate content. If you are no longer using the old Blogspot blog you can insert a redirect code to send visitors to your new domain. This is pretty easy to do, simply place the following code on your exisiting Blogger template -

“<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”3;URL=http://www.yourdomain.com”>
<TITLE>This Blog has moved!</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This Blog has moved! You will be re-directed to our new site in 3 Seconds</p>
<P>If your browser does not redirect you, click <A href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>here</A> to go to the new Blog</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>”