Tuesday 6 December 2016

The Disappearing Clone

Back in February I posted THIS in which I pondered on the existence of a clone of this blog.

At the time I wasn't sure why the clone even existed, but further research showed that such sites are set up in order to gather hits and a solid Google presence, before being converted to other purposes or used for advertising. However I stifled my clone by reporting hundreds of possible links on the site for breach of copyright. And that's what it took; merely reporting the top level domain to Google wasn't enough; I had to pretty much report each post, each tag search and each date range individually. But as I did so the site's presence in Google (and it only seemed to be in Google) grew less and less until basically it disappeared from searches. It still existed, because I'd check every so often, but unless you went looking for it specifically you'd never find it.

Now I see that the link just goes to a domain name registration page; the content has disappeared. I have some slight reservations about claiming the death of my clone; it does say that the domain has been recently registered, so it could be that the individual responsible is going to have another try. But I hope that my fears are unfounded and that a search for my content on Google will return a link to this blog, and not an evil copy.

If you have a blog it's worth googling for your own content from time to time, especially via an image search, just to see if you have acquired a parasite.

6 comments:

  1. Good post on something I know next to nothing about. I will start to remain vigilant - thanks.

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    1. For those of us who just write blogs primarily for themselves it's just annoying that these things happen. It diverts readers, which is a blow to the ego, but nothing more. It's a real issue for people who run commercial blogs which rely on advertising, where the content and hits is a source of revenue.

      Although the nature of the clone, and what they are ultimately up to, may not always be legal either, so eliminating their ability to operate is well worth the effort.

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  2. Good post, something to keep an eye on!

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  3. Crazy. Might have to take your advice and do an image search.
    cheers

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  4. Interesting, just read this and your previous post! Hopefully you've got on top of this problem.

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  5. Looks like I have a copycat too, which boggles my mind because I have so little traffic that copying my blog won't do them much good.

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