Stolen article etc.

The site that you mentioned is probably a splog. Splogs have been around for ages. They take our freely available and easily accessible RSS feeds and use them to re-post our content with their tasteless ads.

First and foremost, you need to “claim” you feed by installing something like Better Feed. Better Feed allows you to create a custom footer for your feed that appears below every post. You can fill the custom footer with things like a copyright notice, a link back to your blog, and even a digital fingerprint to track content theft.

Next, install Bad Behavior to keep most content scraping bots from even visiting your blog.

After that it, it’s up to you if you want to block bots either via user-agent or IP with your .htaccess file. I strongly recommend against IP blocking as most spam bots and content scraping bots use dynamically generated or spoofed IPs, so you’ll only wind up blocking an unsuspecting “victim”.

AntiLeech still exists, and according to the creation date on the downloaded file, it was probably last updated 12/28/09, but whether or not it supports the latest versions of WordPress is unclear.

How do I find out who owns the site? What I actually want to do is see where it is hosted or where the domain name is … and get them to take my article off their site.

This article provides tons of helpful tips.

They are using a wordpress blog On the bottom of the site it has a link to www.ads-software.com

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that. They’re free to use WordPress however they want to. Sometimes I wish there was some sort of magic “delete this blog” button we could push, but there isn’t.

Same thing happened to me when I started posting information regarding the Green Card application process, just as a “trial” for something else and to help people going through the application process…found out my texts were stolen and posted somewhere else.
Me=not happy.

These two sites can usually help with information on the site:

https://ismyblogworking.com/
https://www.dnsstuff.com/?ptype=free

I think there have been a few other threads about dealing with stolen content. Sorry I misplaced them. If my memory is correct the host was ultimately served with a Digital Rights take down notice as the blog owner was not real helpful (if they were honest they would not be scrapers) –

Maybe one of the regulars has the how to deal with stolen content threads bookmarked and and will post them here.

These might help:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/tips-to-deal-with-website-scrapers?replies=2

https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/

Saildude provided you with a bunch of resources. That said, in the short term, if you can locate their host provider, simply send them an email with your claim and they will do their own investigation. That usually shuts down your scraper since it violates TOS. This happens all the time!

You guys are the best.

I have pluged in the plug ins and will play with this this weekend.

I was able to finally figure out who their hosting company was. Because of the ads they had on their website, they were in violation of their hosting package and were removed.

But not all hosts do that; and as quickly as theirs did.

FYI: If someone steals your work, and you can’t get in touch with them via their website (most of the time that’s teh case) I’d go for the hosting company first, domain company second.

Thanks again…

Maria

You’re welcome!