Track Down Those Dirty Content Leeches
Nothing infuriates me more than finding my hard-earned content stolen and posted on some worthless MFA website by a webmaster that’s too lazy, stupid or crooked to bother spending the time to write or generate his or her own stuff. These webmasters usually fall into the category trying to “get rich quick” without doing any real work themselves and oddly, the majority of these webmasters (or at least their suck-ass content-leech websites) seem to be hosted in the same two or three countries. I won’t name those countries – but you know what they are.
I use GoogleAlerts, which notifies me any time it finds my content somewhere on the web. It doesn’t find everything, but if you spend the time and effort configuring enough alerts, it can find a lot of your stolen content. Once I find one of those shitty, worthless websites with my content hidden amongst the plastering of Adsense ads, I usually send a nice email or post a comment kindly asking that they remove my stolen content or at least give credit to my site where it was stolen from. 99% of the time the request goes ignored, so after about a week I report the site to Google by clicking that little “Ads by Google” spot on one of the ads, then scroll to the bottom and click “Send Google Your thoughts”, then click “Also report a violation”. I’ve also reported stolen content on sites that use Kontera to my Kontera account manager. Both have resulted in those websites no longer having the privilege of using Adsense or Kontera.
I also stop content leeches at the source. By enabling the Statistics module in Drupal, I can view the top page-viewing IP’s at the site in the last x hours. Among the familiar IP’s such as the Google Bot and other search bot IP’s, I see new unfamiliar IP’s at the top of the list on almost a daily basis. Any IP that has viewed over 500 or so pages in the last few hours gets a quick WHOIS lookup to see where they’re from. Usually these IP’s are from one of the same few countries or internet providers known for breeding or harboring content thieves and I block them from the site.
I could just throw these content-stealing leech’s IP’s into my HTACCESS file, but that would give them the obvious “403 forbidden” error.. Then they would know I’d banned them and they might get pissed-off (we don’t want a world full of unhappy content-stealing piece-of-shit webmasters do we?) So instead I use the Drupal Troll Module to block them from the site, and give them a custom message. As much as I’m tempted to give them a message that says something like “phuck off you leech”, I instead like to give them something a little more cryptic. Something that looks like the site is down:
Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: error:Too Many Connections for variable ‘ODBC’@'localhost’ (using password: NO) in PATH%\www\content\includes\php-dbi.php on line 225 Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: A link to the server could not be established in PATH% \www\content\includes\php-dbi.php on line 365
Error mysql_query() for ‘@’localhost’ failed SELECT u.uid FROM sessions w, users u WHERE s.sid = ‘i06os2kqgkqbna1d1za8km0i0′ AND s.uid=u.uid
MYSQL CONNECTION FAILURE – PLEASE TRY AGAIN IN A FEW DAYS
Using the Troll Module to block IP’s and display whatever custom message you want is faster and easier (for me) than adding it into the HTACCESS file. But, since the Troll Module logs every blocked IP that tries to access the site, I do end up putting the worst offenders into HTACCESS.
I know it’s a bit like clearing the beach one grain of sand at a time, but I like to think it helps.
[...] recently read a post from Randy Brown of GrownUpGeek about Dirty Content Leeches. He seems to be pretty pissed off with people who leech (or say stole) their hard earned content. [...]
Yes in this case I agree with Jim as my one of the site blog is being automatically copied to one of the other blog i don’t who’s blog was that but than I used my blog to promote the website as i always put 2 to 3 links of my other sites which automatically copied on other blog so in that case i always get 2 back links.
Would be good if Googlealert actually done something about it. i.e. worked with adsense to ban the users account automatically saving you time and effort.
Have you ever heard of proxy site?
At your place,me too will be agry…but thieves are thieves…they hardly changes..
[...] Those “Dirty Content Leeches” I recently read a post by Randy Brown of GrownUpGeek about dirty content leeches. Leeches are those website which automatically grab your content from your RSS feeds and put it up [...]