I learned something new today

I have learned a new lesson related to my craft. Apparently, some websites practice what is called website scraping. This is where they grab your content and then republish it as their own.  Yesterday, I posted “9 ways to keep your mind sharp“.  On that very same day, another site took my post and posted it on their website.  No mention of my name, just a Read More link that pointed to my post.  I discovered this post because of this thing called a pingback. 

Pingback:

A pingback is a message that tells your website that they are linking to you.  The website doing the pingback usually expects that you will link back to them. I am totally amazed that anyone would do either of these practices. The pingback just took me by surprise.  The idea that someone who stole an idea and claimed it as their own would then they want you to link to them.  Sorry, that’s not how I reward people who steal.

Many thanks:

• thanks to Matthew Mullenweg for Akismet.  This tool is invaluable for catching SPAM producers. I can prevent the link-back from being posted, so that’s part of my battle
• thanks to the ProBlogger.com community for their suggestions on dealing with link-farms.
• thanks to Joost de Valt for the wonderful plugin RSS Footer.  This tool makes sure the credit line gets inserted in the RSS feed.

One of my fellow bloggers suggested that I should be flattered that someone likes my stuff so much that they would claim it was theirs.  I guess, I’ve made it to the bigtime.  I’m starting to be copied by other websites.

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