HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

Two stats caught my attention this afternoon, according to Matt, WordPress page views apparently grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month. That is billion with a B. At almost the same time, according to IBM’s X-Force 2008 Trend Statistics, WordPress, as a blog platform is the 9th most vulnerable application vendor. Go figure.

If your site gets any traffic at all, chances are your RSS feed is scraped and misused by some one trying to score on SERP for the work you have toiled on. This very blog is constantly ripped by sploggers who have no regards to intellectual property rights or just plain simple dumb to realize they are stealing. Here are three sites where you can find the entire content of our blog scraped/ripped/stolen and posted as their own. Of course I did not link to them because I really don’t want you to visit them:

myblogmix.com (this m^*&*0 f$%*r even uses one of our themes on his splog!)
frenzygraphics.com
urlfan.com

How do you stop them?
Jonathan Bailey, a security expert (Plagiarism Today) who also writes on Blog Herald, lists 6 steps to identify and fight content theft. We religiously followed the suggestions for months now (that post on BH was from last November), but none worked thus far. Google is yet to acknowledged our letters (used his cease and desist letter templates, which is a good source, thanks!). I even took solace in thinking maybe they have a backlog or that they will eventually write back, but nothing really happened.

I guess folks at WordPress.com start talking about copyright violation only when it hits home. When we cried foul about WordPress themers ripping our work and calling it their own, no one cared except Thomas (and Lorelle).

The reality is, you can’t stop people from stealing content or code, it pinches those of us on the receiving end and it sucks. Google can de-index a few sites, but many more will pop-up.

Although Google is the search engine leader, how many …

I know a lot of people who write posts about how one should blog based on their personal experience, I get a lot of emails asking for pointers, so here’s a list I compiled that is the anti-advice or what I call “5 blogging mistakes I make that you should avoid”.

Be irrelevant: Over 50 percent of my visitors stop by for themes and support, another 35 percent make it here by clicking a link related to, you go it, themes or support, yet I write blogs on issues that bother me like George Bush, or our environment or our absolute disregard towards the value of human lives outside of America. Should …