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.