Make Money from Blogs » Fraud

Making content unique: Googlebot seems to be visiting more often

ashish — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:45:01 +0000

I was following a technique that I had read about in a few blogs, and which seemed a bit logical. I had the same dilemna, whereby the initial set of blogs were started on the Blogger platform, and then, after more research (and many months later), it became clear that after weighing the various pros and cons, there is more sense in moving the Blog onto WordPress. But, there is no clear way of moving the users, regular readers, and feed subscribers to the new blog. This is a problem that many people face, and a lot of blogs advocate a solution whereby content can be kept posted on both blogs for many months (while pointing to users to move to the WordPress blog). A few even suggested that they kept both blogs active, seeing nothing wrong.
And the initial greed was that only, after all, if there is no problem in keeping both blogs active, then why not ? It increases the possibility of either of the blogs appearing in the top search results, and this would result in greater hits, and hopefully greater revenue. Seems logical.
Well, as of a couple of weeks, I have given up that policy. I took the painful decision of deciding to drop some of my blogs (the Blogger versions) and concentrate on making sure that the posts are unique, and only found on the WordPress versions. And why did I do that ? Well, the blogs would show weird behavior with respect to Google search. Suddenly they would drop down in terms of total number of hits from Google search, dropping to a level that was only 10% of the previous one. And this happened multiple times even though the post frequency was around the same.
And then I read the posts on the Google FAQ and their blog where it was mentioned that if duplicate content is found, and it does not seem a question of somebody else copying from your blog, but more of a question of seeming fraud, where it looks like an attempt to manipulate search engine results ranking, then Google can take action. However, if you want to reverse this action, then just stop this behavior, and soon, things will be fine. And even though it is too early to say for sure, I am observing that the Googlebot makes more visit to my blog. Maybe this will have an implication on the actual number of visitors who find my content from Google Search.

Stop Plagiarism: Find the name of the hosting provider

ashish — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:59:42 +0000

Let us consider that you have managed to detect that somebody is copying your content (either by directly taking the content from your blog, or by reading the content from your feed). Now, you need to take steps to get them to stop doing this hosting, or atleast start a discussion with them, so that you can decide on next steps (whether they will change their method of copying so that it meets with your approval, and gives you a link back to your blog, getting you some more traffic).
Now, consider that you are not able to get in touch with the owners of the other blog since they do not have contact details, and sending emails to addresses such as admin@ or owner@, etc do not get a response. This gets you more determined to actually try and get the other blog to take down your content, and you need to work out a way to do so. One way of escalation is to contact the hosting company of the other site to inform that they are hosting content that may be copyrighted, and they should stop hosting all such content. Now, hosting companies normally have policies regarding copyrighted content (it helps that legally a hosting company can be held not responsible for copyrighted content if they have been shown to have taken some action when it has been pointed out to them).
Now, how do you actually detect the hosting company for the other site. Well, a simple solution is to use this site called http://www.whoishostingthis.com/. You just enter the name of the other site that you want to report, and WhoIsHostingThis will provide you with the name of the hosting service. It works, since I tried out a few other sites.
From the site:

Are your hosting results 100% accurate?
As far as we know, there is no way to provide 100% accurate results. However, we use several data sources to find out who is hosting a website, including feedback from users. You can help by reporting bad results for us to investigate.

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Stop Plagiarism: Add backlinks to your content feed

ashish — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:06:09 +0000

RSS feeds give a very easy to get your content up on other sites. Not a very good thing, given that a person looking to get some quick (and steal some content written after a lot of effort) content up on their site would just need to subscribe to your content, and then use this feed (through a plugin) to get this content up on their site. It is very easy to setup a plugin that will take this content from a RSS feed, and automatically get this content up on their site.
Now, there are many reasons as to why you want to not restrict your RSS feed to provide only a summary. If you do restrict your RSS feed to only have a short summary, then it will help in your battle against people who are copying your content, but think of the other implications on your regular readers. There are people who prefer to read content directly through their RSS readers, and you need to evaluate whether you want to cater to this group. However, many such readers are an important part of spreading the content of your blog, given that they spread such links to other people if they like the content. Further, you can place ads in these feeds and hope to make some money from these once you have enough people reading your feeds.
One way in which you can detect that such a problem exists is by adding a few backlinks in your RSS feed. People who manually copy the content can in some cases figure out that backlinks exist, and manually remove these links. Automated solutions have a very high probability of not determining these backlinks. The advantage of backlinks is that you will get a trackback onto your blog that will point to the copy blog. (Keep in mind that you will not derive any Page Rank benefit from these backlinks, as the other blog may not be in high standing with Google).

State your copyright policy cleanly on your blog – Use CreativeCommons.org

ashish — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:18:58 +0000

So, you are now starting getting aware of the grave problem where people steal content available on the internet, and display it on their own sites as their own content, without a credit link or any other way to demonstrate that it is in fact your own content. Of course, they did not ask you for permission, and in some cases, even if they had asked you for permission, you would not have given it – and that is your legal right. Nobody can take content from your site and show it on their site without permission, and if anybody is doing it and claiming that this is the internet, and they are sharing free content, they are actually stealing. If you have posted content on a site, even if it available for others to read and review, the copyright remains yours.
Those who steal content can be of many types – there can be the ones who steal content in an automated way, since they have automated site scrapers, or they have a tool that takes RSS content and automatically publishes it. There are others who are brazen enough to download content and could not care about any legal warnings, or the like. If you were to send them a letter asking for them to stop this stealing, they would ignore you. And then there are the third kind, who copy content, but will be put off if they see some kind of legal warning. And these are the types of people you can stop by doing the next step.
You can put a small copyright policy on your blog such that it stops people from copying your content, and one easy way of doing that is through a site called http://creativecommons.org/. On this site, you can setup a copyright policy by asking a few questions, and you get a small HTML cope that you include in the template on your site. If you go to the specific site called http://creativecommons.org/choose/, you can specify whether you want your content to be copied to be used for commercial purposes, or even prevent modification of your work. Read more of the site:

With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here. For those new to Creative Commons licensing, we’ve prepared a list of things to think about. If you want to offer your work with no conditions or you want to certify a work as public domain, choose one of our public domain tools.

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Your Adsense account was disabled. What can you do ?

ashish — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:49:09 +0000

For a lot of users who have Adsense accounts and started dreaming of making big money, there are a fraction of them who see their dreams get smashed when they suddenly get a notification that their Adsense accounts have been disabled because of some sort of inappropriate behavior, either in terms of the site, or in terms of around the ads themselves. When this happens to people, they can’t believe that their activities were detected by Google, or that Google would bother with individuals.
However, there are a few tips you should keep in mind. Google Adsense program has a list of Program Policies available at this page and you should read this page. These policies control how ads should be placed, who should click ads (you should never click ads yourselves, or encourage people to click on Ads). Google (and other advertisers) have click fraud as one of their high priorities, and determining and removing people who indulge in click fraud is one of their top priorities.
Now, for whatever reason, your Adsense account has been disabled, and you are struggling to determine the reason, next steps, and what you can do to convince Google that you are innocent.

First item, read the Disabled account FAQ (available at this page). Remember, if you are looking for Google to provide you with a lot of information about why your account was disabled, which specific clicks, etc, then you will have to wait for a long time. Google does not provide any help in terms of detailed information, it is for you to convince them that you have a genuine account, and have not committed any wrong doing.
Some of the queries answered on this page are:
Why was my account disabled? Can you tell me more about the invalid click activity you detected?
Can my account be reinstated after being disabled for invalid click activity?
My account was disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can rejoin the program? Can I open a new account?
My account was disabled for being related to another disabled account. Can you tell me more about this relation?
Will I still be paid out for my AdSense earnings?

If your account has been disabled due to Invalid activity, then please go to this form:
Invalid Activity Appeal (link)

Read more before appealing, since that helps you present your information in a more convincing way. For example, refer to this article (link)

Finally, do refer to this FAQ on invalid clicks, and remember, Google takes invalid clicks very seriously.

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