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Two Tools that Help Protect Your Blog from Content Theft (Scrapers)

BloggerSavvy — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:56:51 +0000

Ever search for something in Google and found your content on another site? I have, often. One of the more damaging issues to your blog is when your copyrighted content is stolen and placed on another blog – and here’s the kicker – the content on the other blog has a higher pagerank than yours and is ahead of you in the search results! Quite frankly that’s terrible as it negatively impacts your blog. Not to mention the annoyance when you note that the blog stealing your content appears to be earning advertising revenue, with excessive ads plastered all around it.

I’ve posted about this subject before in “How to Deter Scrapers and Hotlinkers“, which discusses a bit more of the hands-on and some web based tools you can use to help protect your content.

Many of us have may have read all sorts of articles and other blog posts that delve into the legalities, copyright laws, rights and so forth. That’s not something I’m going to discuss as I think there’s too much discussion (and not enough action). If not, just take a look on Google and you’ll find a plethora of posts on the subject. The fact of the matter remains that we can file as many DMCA notices, cease and desist letters, etc. as we want. Often the content thief (called a “scraper” or “splogger”) does not care. After all they already have your content and you can cry and stamp your feet as much as you want – Many of them will simply not budge, especially if they are out of your geographical area or jurisdiction.

A case in point, on one of my other (self hosted) wordpress blogs, several pages were regularly being lifted by a web site in China. The only recourse was that Google removed the stolen content from search results (the hosting provider, etc. did nothing) – Even though Google was removing their search results, that didn’t stop them from adding more (from my stolen content)! Locally (North/South America and Europe) however, that blog has had a 100% success record in take downs of stolen content found on blog sties such as wordpress.com (Automattic), blogspot.com (Google), etc. Providing I followed their DMCA procedures, all issues were resolved.

In my opinion, this approach is ineffective, costly (with long distance faxing) and quite frankly a waste of time (at one point I was filing about 15 DMCA’s a day for that blog). Why? We need to be proactive not reactive! A client of mine uses the tagline “Predictable is preventable” for his blog and security business. And he’s right! We need to deter, curtail and control such theft attacks against our blog content.

It’s difficult to stop such activity, until you can see it occurring, as such, I hope the following tools will help you:

Grab yourself a copy of Antileech. It’s a plugin that does not stop sploggers, rather (in the developers words) “…produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content…” The benefits here are that sploggers seldom read all the content. They have an automatied system grabbing thousands of pages – And now they will have backlinks to your original content, inviting the reader of the splog (containing fake content) to visit your blog instead. That’s link love!

Another effective tool in your arsenal is ©Feed, which allows you to place a digital fingerprint and copyright notice in your content feed (RSS). For those not familiar, in most cases, your RSS is used to facilitate content theft. What’s RSS? Common Craft’s video below easily explains it:

In the words of the ©feed developers “…You can use html. You can add the IP of a feed reader and digital fingerprint for an explicit key. There can also be a domain name for a whitelist and this domains became not the message [sic]. The plugin search for this key at content theft [sic]. It is furthermore possible to add comments and related posts to the feed. For the related post feature it uses a database-search for the content. You can use the plugin “Simple Tagging” for related posts in a feed. The copyright notice can be added even when using entry excerpts…”

Needless to say, the above two tools are very robust and take a proactive approach. There are some other resources I’ve bumped into over time, that provide good reading and further insight:

Hopefully the above helps you (especially those who emailed me asking)!

Do you have any good solutions? What tools do you use? Feel free to comment your thoughts below.

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How to Improve Your Bounce Rates

BloggerSavvy — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:37:22 +0000

Do you monitor your web statistics regularly? Have you noticed that some of your posts have a higher bounce rate than others? Do you want to encourage your visitors to read more of your posts? If so, the following tools and suggestions will help.

Before we review some of the things we can do, let’s define what a “bounce rate” actually is, and see which tools can help us determine our bounce rates.

“Bounce rate” has two definitions. According to Google (analytics) it refers to the act of a visitor entering your blog (or web site) and leaving within the first five seconds. More commonly, we understand it to mean the percentage (or number) of visits to your blog, where the visitor enters and exits the same page without visiting any other pages on your blog. Evidently we want visitors to remain on our blogs.

The top two tools I use to compare and find bounce rates are:

AWStats. AWStats is robust and is a standard statistics gathering system on most web servers.
Google Analytics. Is an online analytics service operated by Google.

Both of the above tools will help you determine your bounce rates. Personally I favour Google Analytics for ease. Additionally, I’d recommend reading Jacob Neilsen’s post “Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click“. In that post he discusses the trend where “…ever-more users are arriving deep within websites rather than entering them through the homepage…” and that your home page should really be your “orienteering point” (from which visitors can access to explore your blog further). He goes on to explain that we should focus on reducing bounce rates for Loyal users. Again, it’s a good read (and short).

What steps can we take to improve (reduce) our bounce rates?

Provide links with which they can subscribe to your RSS feed (appearing on every page).
For those who prefer notifications of new posts (and comments replies), provide the link or feature that enables them to subscribe. Two plugins that can assist you providing such features are: Subscribe To Comments and Subscribe2.
Provide a feature that will inform them of similar content that they may be interested in (further reading). One plugin that can help with this is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Remember that visitors do not always arrive at the home page, so it will also help to ensure you have a search feature (to enable them to narrow down their search on your blog).
Ensure you retain reliable web hosting services. If a site takes too long to access, visitors will move on.
Highlight your feature or your most popular posts in the sidebar of your blog, (some of them may capture further interest).
Ensure your blog is catering to your targeted niche. If your blog is about food and it visually looks more appealing to car enthusiasts, your bounce rate will increase.

The above reduced the bounce rates on my first blog by about 5% on average. Upon review I noticed that the bounce rate was also effected by the types of visitors I was receiving. For example, Stumbleupon campaign traffic incurred a lower bounce rate than traffic from Digg (which for me, had a super high bounce rate – 85%). Why? In my opinion, Stumbleupon visitors were visiting because they were more targeted, whereas my perceptions of Digg traffic was of a less “targeted” nature. As such, the issue that raises up again is the niche focus of the blog. A blog that has posts with little relation to each other is going to have a higher bounce rate than a blog where the posts are naturally related to each other.

What are your thoughts on this? What are your experiences? Feel free to comment and add your input!

Saving Your Data When Disaster Strikes

BloggerSavvy — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:50:35 +0000

For years, I’ve always believed that keeping your data safe is critical. Without a safety net, there’s no fast method to recreate years of blog or web site content additions and updates. I’m sure you’d agree with me right? Right! I’ve rarely had any issues until recently. Do you want to avoid some of these costly issues for your blog?

As some of you are aware, I recently experienced two disasters that effected my blog and how I worked. The first disaster resulted in the initial loss of my blog (and several hours of work it took to write the initial content). The second resulted in the near-loss of data on my computer and a loss of my Internet connection. Both issues lost me time and cost me money.

Issue #1 – Software Related

The web server was configured to automatically create file and database backups every 24 hours. I even received the daily email messages, indicating the backups were created; and faithfully downloaded the new backups each day. Shortly after a I launched this blog, a scripting issue on the server caused all databases to be dropped (deleted). Normally it would be a simple fix to use the existing backups to restore the blog, without much stress.

The reality:

The backups were not overwriting the old ones. So while I was able to use the backups to obtain lost content, the actual data was old (and therefore out dated). Needless to say, it was upsetting to think that I may have lost all my content for a newly launched blog. Unfortunately, the database backup only contained the default blog post and comment entries that are included with the basic Wordpress installation. I did have the files (they were also on my PC), but again, the most important aspect of the blog was the posts (contained in the database).

Fortunately I was saved by the Google Cache, Windows Live Cache and Yahoo Cache using the search term “site:bloggersavvy.com”. If you need to reclaim your posts from the cache you can use the same command to obtain copies of your lost posts using the same search syntax (site:your-domain-name.com). That search term will list all the pages of your site that the Search Engines have indexed and cached. As this was the only recourse, I was lucky to recover 100% of my posts and pages! It took about 8 days for all the content to appear in the cache. One thing I noticed was that I had to search several times a day to catch cached pages, as in some cases cached posts disappeared quicker than I expected (so keep monitoring and save your lost pages right away).

What I learned:

Do not rely or trust in the accuracy of automated backup scripts. Actually read the contents to confirm accuracy.
Do not rely on one or two copies of backups, have a third (independent) “fail safe” to save your posts if your primary backups fail.
Always have an action plan in the event of such a disaster, if you have a plan you will avoid the stress of trying to determine a solution, when things are not working. Speaking of which, finding solutions when you are under stress is not as productive as finding them when things are okay.
Solve the problem before it happens, be proactive. Had there been a third independent backup system operating, chances are the recovery would have taken a couple hours at most (instead of a week).

Issue #2 – Hardware Related

I configured my computer to automatically download all data, every 24 hours. This resulted in backups being created on my PC (which I later forwarded to another small file server on my local network). This resulted in me having a second off site backup of all my blog posts and files (the first backup remains on the hosting server). Also because I would copy the backups (on my PC) to another file server, I had a third backup. A backup of the backup so to speak.

The reality:

While I was diligent in ensuring I had off site backups (with current data), I failed to plan effectively for a hardware failure. My computer has two hard drives and both of them started to fail! My operating system became crippled and it was hard to boot up the PC. I used a bootable diagnostic disk from the hard drive manufacturer and their diagnostic confirmed the hard drives were failing. To further compound this issue, I had a switch on my network (it acts like a hub to allow more than one computer to access the network – and internet), which failed, resulting in me not being able to access the Internet.

Replacing the switch was easily accomplished by a quick trip to the PC hardware store. I had to order 2 new hard drives to replace the failing ones and reinstall the operating system along with the applications. Before doing this, I needed to reclaim the lost data (as the file server only had some of the data copied to it). After phoning a few data restoration companies, who gave me (in my opinion) excessive and expensive options of $250 – $3500 CDN, before even working on obtaining the actual data, I decided to find out other options. I send a few messages on twitter from a friend’s computer and used Google to search for some self-help options. I found a good solution for about $135 CDN, called “Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recover“. I downloaded the demo version first, just to see if it could access the drive (it did) and then paid for the full version to recover my lost data (which automatically sent it to the working file server). One issue I had to deal with was the constant reboots of the system (not because of the recovery software) but because of the failing drives (which the operating system was also on). It took almost four days to finally reclaim just about 100% of my data.

I also opted to install a proactive solution and purchased a D-Link DNS-321 network storage unit, to which I added two more hard drives again, and had one mirroring all it’s contents to the other. In the event when one of those drives fails – and eventually they will, the second drive in that unit will be a duplicate of the failed drive.

Waiting for parts, installation of software, etc. cost me about a week of lost time and work. But using the data recovery software and replacing the hardware fixed all issues.

What I learned:

Always plan for unexpected hardware failures. Moving parts (such as hard drives) do eventually fail.
It is unrealistic (for home users or small business operators) to keep extra hard drives on hand, so make sure there is a separate storage unit (that is a backup of your existing data).
Keep 3 sets of blog backups at the very least. One on the web server, one on your PC and the third on a separate system (or backup network storage unit). Doing so is proactive and resolves data loss issues before they happen).
Be nice to your web hosting support team! – If you are nice to them, they will be nice to you. Capiche?

I should note that there are online solutions as well, such as:

However, I have not actually used their services, so have no idea of the support or service level quality. I’d appreciate (we all would, I think) comments below from anyone who does use online backup services. Are they effective, easy, affordable, etc? Please let us know in your comments.

Side note: I also use a Wordpress plugin that supports automatic backup scheduling of my blogs database and emails me a copy of the database every day, it may help you too.

In conclusion, I cannot stress enough the need for all blog owners (such as myself) to have a disaster plan ready. Doing so will reduce stress and down time. Additionally, the second factor that needs extra emphasis is to ensure you operate in a proactive manner. Remember that your data (and the blog requiring it) can be effected by software failures, hardware failures, malicious activities, and so forth. As such, I cannot stress enough the peace of mind that comes with the knowledge that redundant backup systems bring.

Here’s a helpful how-to backup video from BetaFlux Studios on YouTube: “…it will show you how to create and run a very important backup utility in your operating system…”:

Have you had any issues similar to these? How did you resolve them? Did I miss anything in this post? Or do you provide related solutions that help blog owners? Feel free to answer below!

Top 15 Software Applications for Windows Bloggers

BloggerSavvy — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:31:17 +0000

As some of you may know, my primary blogging applications are on Linux based PC’s, however a large portion of my clients and visitors are Windows based and several have asked me what I think would be the best software for Windows based bloggers – To improve productivity, safeguard information, enhance research and communication. I prefer to take a frugal approach to answering such questions, after all, why incur extra costs when you don’t have to?

Side note: Many of these applications are also available to my Linux friends (and Mac) too.

For all those who asked, and those interested to know, I’m sure something on the list below will be useful:

1) eMail Communication.

Thunderbird is an email client that features intelligent (learning) spam filters, spell checker and customizable layout. It provides IMAP/POP support, HTML email composing, email search, address book, advanced message filtering, address completion, import tools, and multiple email and (RSS) newsgroup accounts. You can add extensions for extra features including:

Quicktext email template creation and for super fast addition of predefined text snippets to an email message.
Display Mail User Agent so that you can better see what application is sending you email. This helps in avoiding spoofed email. For example, Google is never going to send you email using Outlook Express.
Duplicate Contact Manger helps you avoid duplicated contacts in your address book.
Multi Language Dictionaries allow you to customize your spell checking option.

2) Web Surfing.

Firefox helps you browse web pages faster (for improved researching), more safely, and more efficiently. Some good features are pop up blocking, tabbed browsing to let you view multiple web pages in a single window, and opening links in the background so that they’re ready for viewing when you’re ready to read them. Again, there are several plugins I use, which may also aid you. Some of the ones I find most helpful (among others) are:

Add Bookmark Here 2 is an extension that facilitates adding your bookmark to any category without wading through the menu system.
Colourful Tabs creates a different colour for each tab. It makes tabs easy to see and easy to switch too when I have an excessive number of tabs open. (Which happens often when I’m conducting online research).
Copy Plain Text helps me avoid the formatting when I am copying text between pages and blog posts. Nothing’s more annoying then copying text to find it’s also duplicated the font, colour, font size, etc. This extension gives you the choice to copy something as plain text only.
Kgen allows us to see which keywords are strong on our blog post and pages. Then we can use them on social sites as more effective (and relevant) tags or for SEO (Search Engine Optimization.
PrintPDF enables a simple print to pdf function for Firefox. Simple and useful.
Read It Later is one of the tools I use the most! Sometimes I don’t really need to keep a bookmark of a page; I just need a way to flag it for later reading. This extension does just that, it helps me avoid cluttering my bookmarks with pages I’ll probably only read once or twice.
Reload Every will reload a web page every so many seconds or minutes (that you set). It is very useful for pages where the content is changing. For example, I use it when sniping items on eBay, (this allows me to place a bid at the last possible moment). It’s an automated way to keep refreshing content in your browser window.
SEOQuake is a robust tool that helps with SEO and Internet promotion. It’s an intelligence and investigation tool that simplifies your access to pagerank, indexing, keywords, social site inbound links and other features.
TagSifter is a way to tag each bookmark you make (with one or more tags). This makes searching for bookmarks or related bookmarks, faster and simpler.
Update Scanner is useful to us when a site does not have an RSS feed as it monitors site changes. It also helps us monitor changes to pages (also when the changes won’t be found in a site’s RSS feed).

3) File Uploading.

Filezilla is an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application that allows you to upload and download files to and from your server. One useful feature is the ability to resume (in case the connection to your web hosting server is interrupted. Most of us will use the Filezilla Client (not Server).

4) Content Mirroring.

HTTrack helps keep a local copy of all your blog content on your local PC. While I always stress that you must keep an off site, current backup of your blog files and database in your possession at all times. This tool will maintain a full copy of your blog content on your PC, or on your laptop. It also allows you to display your blog when a web connection in unavailable.

5) Web Browsing Safety.

PeerGuardian helps protect us form visiting bad sites as it maintains an IP blacklist. If a web site or blog is hosted on a blacklisted IP, PeerGuardian will intervene to safeguard you.

6) Offline Blogging.

w.bloggar is a tool that I can take with me (on a USB flash drive). It allows us to edit posts when we are not connected to the Internet. It also allows us to create posts when not connected to the Internet. Our content is save locally. When we have a connection we can simply publish our changes and new posts and voilà, they will appear in our blog.

7) Healthy Blogging.

Workrave helps me in preventing of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). It frequently alerts me to take small pauses, rest breaks and restricts me to my daily limit. I find I’m in front of the PC all day and this application helps me avoid not only wrist, arm, shoulder and neck pain; but also helps avoid eye strain.

8) Accounting Information.

GnuCash is a personal and also a small business accounting package. I like it because it is cross platform friendly (meaning I can use it on Linux and Windows). It’s easier to use than the name may suggest. .

9) Presentation Creation.

Wink is a great tool for those of use who need to create tutorials and presentations for our blogs.

10) Traffic Building Tool.

TweetDeck, being one of the most recent applications I use to monitor twitter as well as communicate with twitter users. It’s simpler to use (in my opinion) than some of the other applications I’ve tried. It helps me break down the communication into manageable chunks, that way I’m not spending excessive time on twitter.

11) Document Creation.

OpenOffice helps me create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. I use it to create seminar presentations and documents for my blog clients. Again, there are a fair number of extensions that allow you to improve upon features and enhance your blogging productivity: Open Office extensions.

12) Graphic Creation.

Gimp helps me retouch photos or create new images. It also comes with a long list of plugins, from which you can select and install.

13) Time Tracking.

ToDoList facilitates time tracking using timers you can activate when you are working on a task. It helps make time tracking painless and improves productivity (as you can see where your time is spent and where you could better spend it). You’ll notice it has lots of other features too.

14) Desktop Publishing.

Scribus is a desktop publishing software that with an intuitive interface; usable for press-ready documents. Again it’s cross platform ready, so I can create print page layouts on Linux, Mac or Windows.

15) Data Backup.

BackupPC is my favourite automated backup system. It back up all the important data on my blogging computer to another server (which in my case is on an internal network). It helps prevent data loss if my PC fails (saving my contacts, documents, bookmarks, images, PDF’s, etc.)

As may be evident, there’s not a lot of “extra” software installed on my “Blogging Box” (the PC I use exclusively for blogging). It’s a lean, mean machine. Humour aside, one aspect to good applications and good productivity is to eliminate the “fluff” and interruptions in your work flow. Again, one huge benefit is that all the software is free, there is no cost.

While I’m sure many of you may have seen or use other applications I’ve not mentioned (or may not have considered), this list is by no means exclusive. What applications do you think are good for bloggers? What big omissions have I made? Comment below and let us know what else should be on this list.

25 Most Beneficial Wordpress Blog Plugins

BloggerSavvy — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:33:18 +0000

I’m often asked what plugins are the best for Wordpress, or if I know of a plugin that provides some specific functionality. A reader commented in one of my earlier posts, asking “…if there were some plugins that would work well with marketing and other stuff…” (10 Steps to Effective eNewsletter Marketing).
Some of the benefits of the plugin list below include:

Enhanced blog visitor experience.
Increased traffic and blog promotion.
Improved security and blog performance.
Simplified blog management and productivity.
Better visitor communication.
More effective search engine optimization.
Greater integration with popular Internet communities and services.

Where to get it:v

http://sivel.net/2008/10/better-howdy/

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Why I like it:

It allows visitors to rate content, which helps you to see what is most in demand. As such, you’re better able to provide the content that visitors want. In a way, it’s another traffic building tool.

Where to get it:

http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-postratings

21) WP-PostRatings Widget

Works in conjunction with WP-PostRatings above. Displays the most rated and/or highest rated posts and/or pages on your sidebar.

Why I like it:

It helps visitors queue into the most highly rated content. It helps them find the hotest content right away.

Where to get it:

Remember to install and activate WP-PostRatings first. http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-postratings

22) WP-Sticky

Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.

Why I like it:

I can display announcement and sticky posts only when viewing categories or not. I can display an announcement banner or display the date instead of the announcement banner (on announcement posts).

Where to get it:

http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-sticky

23) WP Super Cache

It’s a very fast caching module to help improve blog performance. Why have the server create your pages every time there’s a visitor? This plugin will cache previously created pages, to speed up surfing through your blog.

Why I like it:

I can turn it on or off as needed (even partially on). I can specify how long to keep cached content for. I can even prepare the blog for an expected spike in traffic by enabling the lock down feature. When this is enabled, new comments on a post will not refresh the cached static files. The lockdown feature is only useful if you are expecting a major Digg or Slashdot level of traffic to one of your posts or pages.

Where to get it:

http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

24) Wordbook

Allows you to cross post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts.

Why I like it:

It’s automated and helps build traffic while letting Facebook visitors know when valuable content has been posted.

Where to get it:

http://www.tsaiberspace.net/blog/2007/07/29/wordbook/

25) Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of the related entries under each blog post, (based on a unique algorithm) using titles, post bodies, tags and categories; with RSS feed support.

Why I like it:

It easily helps visitors find other content that may be of interest to them, and it’s also works automatically.

Where to get it:

http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/

Again, these are the 25 I’ve found to be most beneficial not just to this blog, but others as well. Of course there are tons of other Wordpress plugins that benefit us. Have a suggestion? Use a good plugin that I’ve not listed? Please, include the links in your comments below.

Update:

I’ve tested another plugin and it’s working great. It’s called What Would Seth Godin Do.

Why I like it:

It displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors; and I can place it at the top of posts and pages. I also like it because it automatic. (I like automated tools). Needless to say, it’s a good tool to promote features on a site, inform visitors, make announcements and lots of other benefits.

Where to get it:

http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do

How to Deter Scrapers and Hotlinkers

BloggerSavvy — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:56:41 +0000

When I launched my first blog (a Linux based niche blog) at Ubuntu Linux Help, initially I did not have much content. As content built and traffic grew, I ended up writing some posts that went viral. Three of them were:

I enjoyed the traffic those posts provided (and still provide to this day) as they helped my blog grow. I think they were popular because they provided a valuable resource as well as elicited fair bit of discussion, as some of the posts and resulting comments were very outspoken and opinionated. One of the above posts (Why I Quit Windows and Switched to Linux) was a very personal story describing some of my career experiences and how they effected my professional life and thoughts.

Imagine my surprise when I found another blog with the identical content on it. So much so, that the author who scraped my content claimed it as his own! At that time I had more than enough technical knowledge to initiate actions that would catch-out scrapers, but I’d not yet fully experienced some of the nitty-gritty administrative aspects such as contacting the hosting providers, filing DMCA notices et al.

For that matter, why would this be an important issue? Why should bloggers (or any web site owner for that matter) take actions to mitigate such issues? Well a few good reasons immediately come to mind:

It’s annoying. A blogger puts a fair bit of work into his or her post, only to find it copied elsewhere and used to earn revenue (usually via advertising) for the content thief.

It can impact your web hosting cost if you have a busy site. Remember, most hosting accounts have a monthly bandwidth allowance. Exceed the monthly bandwidth and the blog owner incurs extra cost. But wait!… How did scrapers cause my cost to increase? Simply put, they copied the text content onto their blogs and linked the images (in that content) from my blog. This resulted in the text being duplicated on their site and the images being stored on my hosting account. When a web browser viewed the content on their page, it was pulling the images (for that content) from my hosting account, for which I had to pay the bandwidth.

It can reduce your Google (SEO) ranking. How does that happen? When Google finds content, it tries to determine if the content is original (not copied from another site) and proceeds to provide it with page ranking data. It is conceivable that content can be copied and receive a page rank (and inclusion in Google search results), without the original blog article being yet found by Google. If it get’s found by Google later, how can you ensure that your original becomes noted as the original post? Don’t misunderstand me, search engines like Google do try to remove duplicate content, but it becomes difficult when your original content becomes listed as the duplicate.

One important issue I realized is that you cannot be overly emotional about such actions. When trying to fix such issues, you need to work with various parties such as Google DMCA, Hosting Providers, etc. Sending them flippant or angry letters is not going to get you the help you need. Remember, large organizations and businesses deal with such issues daily and they are not impressed with theatrics. You need to have these people on your side. Remaining calm, assertive and professional goes a long way to getting support (as does courtesy).

Let’s define a couple things before we move on…

A scraper is someone who copies your content and places it on another site, without your permission. In essence this is theft of your intellectual property.
A hotlinker is someone who displays your images on another site, and uses the coding on their page is such a way so as to pull the image that is stored on your server (hosting account), for display on another page. As I mentioned earlier, this is tantamount to bandwidth theft.

I’m often asked how I discover that my content has been scraped or hotlinked. There are several tools that when used on a regular basis, can help you reduce the amount of content thieves.

Review your web statistics.

All good hosting accounts have built in web statistics. In my opinion AWStats ranks highly. AWStats has a feature that displays “Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)”

The display will show you the URL of the page linking to you as well as the number of hits to your page. It will also tell you how many page loads (of your pages) that URL initiates. For example if another site URL causes 10 hits on my site, then there should also be 10 page loads. If not something’s up. Take a look at the image below (clicking on the image will show you the large version).

AWStats hotlinker example

What you’re seeing in the edited image above, is that another site has displayed something (from my site) 1645 times but never actually sent a visitor to my site. In other words my content (an image in this case) was shown on another site, but no page visits (referals) were ever recorded coming from that site. I visited the URL in question, and sure enough, the site was hotlinking to one of my images.

Use online services.

One service I’ve experimented with is Copyscape. They are a site that provides a service which scans other web sites, providing you with the URL of copied content. In my case I found scraped content (stolen from my other blog) during the writing of this very post. That is… one of my original blog posts, was found via Copyscape to be duplicated verbatum on another web site in another country. They were using it to sell their advertising space and also had hot linked to all my images. While they did include a link to my original post and did list my URL as the “Original link”, they did so without permission and were using my complete work for their own profit.

A Google search will provide you with a plethora of other sites that provide such services, I’m only mentioning Copyscape as one good example. To further take advantage of such tools, its most advantageous to include a very unique sentence in any given post and search for it in Google (that’s often a very quick method to catch sites that copy your valuable content).

Once you’ve been able to isolate a specific URL that has hotlinked and/or scraped content, what can you do about it?

Here’s how the process should work:

Find and isolate a specific URL that is using your content.
Evaluate the need to take action. Are they still sending you traffic or referrals in some fashion? The bottom line question you could ask yourself is “Does their copied content really do my blog enough harm that I have no option but to follow through?” If you’ve answered yes, action is the next step.
Take action.

But wait! What actions are there? Can I really protect myself from a scraper or hotlinker in another country?

Before moving into they types of actions (tools) you can use to protect your content, it’s important to keep one salient point in mind:

If you have some content that is so important, private or valuable, etc. and you do not want other people to copy it, then DO NOT POST IT ON THE INTERNET. If you post something of excessive value on the Internet, no measure of copyright protection is going to prevent an individual from accessing it and copying it. But (there’s always a “but”), there are ways you can impede the profitability and earning power of copied content and in some cases injecting your own revenue generating systems into content copied from your site.

So what kinds of actions can we take?

Make sure you provide appropriate copyright notifications within every page of your blog. If you intend to permit your content to be shared, Creative Commons provides a great copyright tool wherein you can specify how your content is shared. You’ll find that tool at Creative Commons. You can select your jurisdiction in a drop down menu on the upper right side of the home page.

Is the copied content being served by Google Adsense? If so, you can issue an infringement notice at Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Google AdSense. I’ve found the best method is to fax the notice to the number they provide. In practice, I’ve found that it takes a few days for this to work through their system. However, they have always acted professionally, responsible and have indeed taken action.

As a side note: If you are looking for notification templates you can use, take a look at Copyright Law and SEO Part 3 (Sample DMCA Notifications, in HTML and MS Word Format), found on the McAnerin International web site.

Personally, I’ve experienced an excessive number of blogs copying content to Blogger.com based blogs. If you review their Blogger Content Policy, you’ll also find that notifications are to be sent to Google at Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Blogger. Again, I’ve found the response to be incredibly fast and Blogger.com is very quick (in my experience) to remove the violating content.

Many scrapers capture and repost your content by tapping into the RSS feed of your blog.

Side note: If you’re not very familiar with RSS feeds, Commoncraft has a great video, RSS in Plain English.

The fact that they are simply capturing and re-posting your RSS feeds may be indicative of an automated system (with little human intervention), where the scraper may not necessarily read your copied content. If that’s the case, you could try embedding a link back to your blog. There’s a great Wordpress plugin that will automatically do just that: RSS Footer. (One helpful thing is the RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics, which helps with the tracking of non-adwords advertising campaigns. If you log into Google Analytics and go to your created campaign and view the traffic sources information you’ll garner more information).

Try earning a bit of revenue from your stolen feed content. If you’re a Google Adsense publisher, try the “AdSense for Feeds” option within your “Adsense Setup”. Additionally, the RSS Footer plugin above, I think can also be used to embed advertising content from any other affiliates or advertisers you subscribe to.

For those who are a little stronger at coding issues, you may want to try out a great little Wordpress plugin called “From RSS?“, where, as their site says: “…do something extra for your RSS subscribers, you might want to give them a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some annoying footer about subscribing to the RSS feed. This plugin facilitates that…”

You can of course Report a Spam Result to Google which they use to help “…maintain the quality of Google search results.”

Finally another tactic that’s available is to report the site to the hosting company. There must be a ton of resources to help isolate who is the ultimate network provider (for the server that hosts the offending web site), of which I primarily use two:

Whois lookup and Domain name search and
Netcraft’s Search Web by Domain.

Using the domaintools.com site, I can see which DNS servers are managing the domain (ostensibly indicating who’s hosting it). And with Netcraft’s tools, I can determine who owns the IP address block that the website and server is one, thereby opening another venue of recourse.

In conclusion, I’d like to remind everyone of on salient issue. There may always be hotlinkers and scrapers of our content. I don’t think anyone can stop all of them, as doing so would in all likelihood prevent legitimate visitors from viewing your content, instead the primary objective of this post was simply to impart the concept of DETERENCE, so as to reduce such activities.

10 Steps to Effective eNewsletter Marketing

BloggerSavvy — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:36:16 +0000

I received an email message from a client asking me if I had any solutions for an eNewsletter system that could be run under their own domain name. Some of the feature suggested were:

Automated subscription management (subscribe/unsubscribe).
Statistics/Click through rate.
Ability to send in both text and html (at the same time).
No installation of software on their PC.
Automated server transmission of email.
Automated server management of bounced email addresses.

And the list goes on…

Suffice to say, it did make me think about some of the aspects I’ve experienced in emailed newsletter subscriptions, good and bad. In many cases I’ve observed individuals launch a newsletter – full of excitement! Only, later to find that they did not garner their anticipated results. Inevitably, after review, it became evident that the root causes of an unsuccessful newsletter system was in poor planing.

In every public seminar I present, I almost always touch on the importance of solid planning (and sticking to the plan!). It does not matter how small or large the project is, it always needs a plan. Which brings to mind the old adage…

“If you want some exercise walk around, if you want to get somewhere, plan your route!“

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting this particular client has poor planning skills (quite the opposite in fact!), rather it led me to posting about my experiences and how I’d suggest people could build an effective, successful online newsletter system; one that best promotes their business, interest, web site, blog, etc. Hopefully some of the points will help you.

Note: While I am a Certified Network Engineer (MCSE, N+, MCP+I), I’ve endeavoured not to delve too much into the technical aspects. However I don’t mind fielding such questions as I do operate my own servers as well as providing web/blog development, online solutions and hosting services for other clients.

In my opinion one crux of a successful newsletter must be to ask yourself “Why do I want to launch a newsletter?” Remember that the potential subscriber of that newsletter is going to ask themselves “What’s in it for me?” – Make sure you provide enough benefits to answer their needs; and in doing so, remember the mantra:

“Benefits sell, features don’t“.

What makes your newsletter better than any other newsletter? – Do something that makes you stand out and get noticed.

When I first read their email and considered the newsletter angle, several questions jumped to the forefront:

Why don’t they just promote their RSS feed? (They don’t have one – For those that don’t know, here is a great resource showing you what an RSS feed is: RSS Feeds in Plain English).
Why don’t they just blog about it? (Their site is not a blog platform).
Newsletters are not an “A <-> B” conversation, rather one-way. (Sure but newsletters remind readers to return).
Newsletters are old-fashioned. (That may be, but they are familiar venues to many people).
Newsletters are simply sending information already on the web site or blog, that’s not interesting is it? (It is interesting if you use the newsletter to build interest – such as announcements about what’s coming, etc. – or Information not currently on the site).
The content may not be of interest to all the recipients, many will simply delete the email. (But that’s really a benefit! You can target specific “groups” of readers with specific “targeted” content – You’ve always got to try and look at the upside of things).

For a moment, let’s expand on some of those questions and comments.

One thing I learned from my other blog, is that I had (and still do) a lot of one-time visitors. These are visitors that find my blog via search engines (Google) or from links in other blogs, forums, etc. They visit my site and on average view 3.25 pages and then leave, never returning. On tool that could help turn them into repeat visitors is a newsletter. I’m not suggesting that every one of them will subscribe, rather a blog (or web site) containing quality content and a well written subscription “call to action“, may motivate some of them to subscribe. Much in the same way that product manufacturers work to improve brand loyalty, newsletters are one tool you can use to promote reader loyalty.

As I mentioned, newsletters have the ability to share information that is not yet on the site. They compliment the site. One way of facilitating this could be to induce interest by keeping your readers in the loop on new events, upcoming features, etc. This can be very powerful as it helps to build media buzz and interest. Just look at how the movie industry uses this… They announce an upcoming movie and let you see just a few of the really good bits as teasers, then you’re kept in suspense, interest captured until the new movie is finally available and your able to watch it.

Newsletters help you to build a community or business network, so much so, that a good newsletter should actively encourage feedback (and perhaps, pre-stage that membership for a future forum environment ). In my opinion, people like to be part of a community; and they arguably will be the most loyal visitors, who will encourage others to become regular visitors. (Nothing like a good debate or discussion elicited by your newsletter).

Obviously there are several reasons (or motivators) why we would want to launch a newsletter, once we’ve made the call however, there are several things to consider in order to bring our newsletter plans to fruition.

In my opinion, there are ten steps to successful and effective enewsletter marketing.

1) Plan your key objectives and stay within them.

What is the purpose of your newsletter? What tangible, measurable goal(s) are you building towards? As I’ve mentioned, there are several objectives your newsletter can be used to help reach, some examples being:

Are you building a business network or community?
Improve/Increase traffic statistics of your site or blog?
Garnering greater public awareness?
Elicit greater feedback and interactivity?
Enhance media PR marketing?
Appealing to a new niche of specific people?
Capturing readers who do not use your feeds (RSS)?

Many of us will try to include more than one objective. I learned the hard way, always have one primary objective that you work towards. It should take precedence over some of your secondary objectives. I’ll say it again… ALWAYS focus on the prime objective.

2) Create content that is scannable.

Most individuals (including myself) quickly scan the contents of messages first. Doing so helps us to evaluate when the message should be acted upon (the importance level) and if it’s interesting enough for us to read. Think about it a moment, when you pick up a newspaper don’t you quickly scan the article to see what it’s about – and then read it if it captures your interest?

Scannable content does not just refer to the text itself, it refers to the visual (esthetic) elements as well. Elements such as bolding, icons, highlighting on backgrounds, etc. Ever used a magic marker to highlight key text when studying? ;)

3) Tell people what you enewsletter focuses on, what it’s about.

I’m sure you’ll want to keep your subscribers. Tell them up front what the newsletter is about, what topic ranges it covers and how the newsletter will benefit the reader. And stick to that commitment! Time and time again, I’ve subscribed to newsletters that promised content, features and benefits that I was interested. And time again I’ve unsubscribed because they did not deliver. This brings to mind a very salient issue:

It’s better to have a smaller number of subscribers who receive the content they expected than those who unsubscribed because you didn’t follow through with your offerings (some of whom think they got – forgive the expression – suckered into signing up with empty promises). Be genuine… that small group may help your newsletter marketing more than you realize.

4) Be consistent and regular.

If your newsletter is monthly, make sure you always deliver.
If your newsletter is quarterly, make sure you always deliver and so on…

There’s nothing worse than haphazard delivery. For those of us who have printed newspaper subscriptions, I’m sure they can attest to the annoyance when the newspaper fails to be delivered or is often delivered late.

By consistent, I’m referring to the style and content. It’s a good idea to use the same style of writing as used in your web site or blog. Why? That’s probably what people expect. There’s nothing wrong with having a guest writer contribute (that’s often a good idea), but think for a moment, if people like your site content writing style, then they’ll also like that same style in your newsletter. In some ways, this also touches on branding issues (albeit that’s a whole discussion in itself) – branding does not refer just to graphics, rather your whole packaging – including the writing style.

5) Build interest with titles.

Newspapers are the masters of capturing interest with titles and describing the content with titles. They’ve had centuries to perfect. Your title is a critical component as it will be the primary deciding factor as to whether someone will read your newsletter or not.

Using RSS feeds as an example, I subscribe to about 12 feeds from various blogs that I am seriously interested in. Each morning I review the new articles and decide which I will return to read in the evening, and which I delete. The only thing I read is the title, that’s it! If the title captures me I save it for reading, if not, I delete it right away.

Note: In addition to titles, please keep in mind that content in the top of your newsletter (above the fold) will receive more immediate interest than below the fold. Similarly, links near the top will also be clicked more often. This is also a good SEO strategy, namely to pack your best punch in your first paragraph.

One caveat to watch out for with newsletter (as opposed to RSS feeds) is the title you give your newsletter blast. It’s important to be able to “brand” and identify your newsletter right away (because readers are expecting it and need to easily find it within their email), however there also needs to be some description of the content itself. Try experimenting to achieve a balance between the two. If BloggerSavvy had a newsletter, I’d initially try an enewsletter subject line that reads something like this example:

“BloggerSavvy Newsletter – 10 sizzling marketing tips, New blog contest, How to get featured on Digg, and more…”

The above example clearly indicates who the newsletter is from and highlights some of the top content that may most capture interest.

6) Use standard, reliable tools.

Evidently a component upon which you should place a fair bit of emphasis is the engine that runs your newsletter and subscriptions. While many people use a third party subscription service, I personally don’t think that is the best way to go. Why? In my opinion:

It’s a privacy issue. Third-parties do not need to control my database of subscribers.
In the past I have had large numbers of people unsubscribing because the domain sending newsletters was not the same domain as the one that creates the newsletter.
In my opinion (with regards to point #2) it also looks very unprofessional when my domain is xxx.com but the domain sending the newsletter is yyy.com – it just does not come across as professional (in my opinion).
It’s not the best choice to operate a newsletter under the behest of a third party. What happens if they change the rules, sell their business, go out of business. (Who owns the actual database?)
From personal experience, I have often encountered unreliable services from such providers.
Using third party services often increases your costs.

What would I suggest?

Use you own newsletter service. I often suggest PHPList as a viable, reliable alternative; in great part because you can install it under your own domain and it easily integrates with the premier blogging platform, Wordpress. Some of my favourite phplist features are noted on the home page of their web site as:

Double opt-in subscription mechanism
Scheduling
RSS
User Specific Content
Click-tracking
Attachments
Bounce management
Domain Throttling
Server Throttling

While a search on Google should provide you with dozens of systems, I’ve personally found that this package works both in terms of reliability and features. One benefit is that the system is virtually automated (including double opt-in – more about that below) and all you have to do is provide content – It will even archive your newsletters! More features of that package are here: phplist.com/details and for all the Wordpress users the plugin to integrate the system (into Wordpress) is called WP-PHPList. It’s also interesting to note that this open source package also integrates into many other platforms, including ecommerce, forums and CMS related engines.

Bottom line, while third party relayers, I’m sure do provide good service, in my opinion, I’d prefer to retain control of my own subscribers and manage them under my own domain and branding – for many of the reasons I listed above. In my opinion, this is a much more professional way to operate enewsletter transmissions.

7) Monitor and track your results.

Ensure that you use a combination of tools to monitor your activities; both from the newsletter system and the resulting server (your domain) that provides content such as images, video, audio, etc. I would suggest using the tracking tools that come with the newsletter mailing list (such as phplist) with Google Analytics and your own servers statistics. In my opinion, one of the better server based statistics package is called AWStats. Using a combination of tools (and not relaying on one tool) helps to provide a more realistic “picture” (as different tools gather and correlate data in different ways).

Paying attention to which links are clicked, will give you insight as to which pages provide the most in demand and valued content. They will also help when you’re “experimenting” with your content style and placement, etc.

As a quick practical example, knowing which content garners the greatest click through to a page will quickly tell you which pages and content could best be used to “announce” things to your readers. It will also tell you which content you may want to follow-up on or further capitalize upon (because of the heightened interest).

8) Ensure your newsletter provides double opt in subscription.

Double opt in is a subscription feature wherein the subscriber enters their subscription email address and then confirms that subscription via an email sent by the newsletter server. It’s primary purpose is to ensure that subscribers truly wish to subscribe. I think that here in Canada this (double opt in) is a requirement (but I’m not 100% sure about that).

You will want to do this as it prevents damage to your blog (or web site) occurring from users who are added to your subscribers list without permission.

I have often entered my contacts into only the subscription databases that I directly control, and always have the tools in place that allow them to unsubscribe. While technically this is a grey area, I’ve never had issues or complaints as my subscribers were always generally intelligent, forgiving individuals.

I have personally seen other newsletters fail because they purchased lists of email addresses and added them to the database, as such they ended up with a poisoned database that was overflowing with unqualified readers who did not care and were not interested in the content. In one case the domain name became blacklisted as a spam domain, which irreparably destroyed that blog’s brand and reputation.

9) Grow your benefits and quality.

There are several ways to help keep readership growing. Obviously, one way is to continue providing high quality, in demand content. Consistently give your readers something of value, something that benefits them.

You could provide them with new content in each newsletter or revisit existing content on your blog/web site (or both). Personally, I tend to use a bit of both.

Why?

Statistics show me which topics are hot and would benefit from a follow-up.
New content keeps things fresh and interesting and provides incentive to subscribe as the content does not have appear on the blog until after the subscribers have received it.

One key is to always remain consistent, don’t procrastinate. As I alluded above, it can be very annoying (and make your newsletter appear really “flaky”) if it’s operated in a haphazard manner and if the content is not targeted. Content should be targeted.

Quite often newsletter content is not so much a matter of “What would I like to include in the newsletter this time?” rather it’s (in my opinion) more of an issue of “What do my subscribers want to read about?” “What interests them?” In other words select targeted content for targeted readers, that’s effective.

This leads to the final point… #10

10) Talk to your subscribers and get feedback.

Communicating with your readers may be an eye opening experience. While we can garner a fair bit of intelligence from review statistics, we can obtain some insight through reader input.

Don’t be afraid to contact your most loyal readers, ask them how you can improve the newsletter. Ask them what they would do. I’ve often been surprised at some of the beneficial things I’ve learned.

Equally, talk to those who have unsubscribed ask them if they wouldn’t mind telling you why. Sometimes you may not like what you hear, but if you listen, really listen, you’ll often discover other areas of improvement.

Obtaining feedback helps to ensure the effectiveness of your newsletter marketing as you’ll remain in touch with your readers. You will be talking to them, not at them.

You’ll be empowering them as a community and building brand loyalty and pride in ownership, which is probably one of the most powerful aspects of effective online newsletter marketing!