HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

We wrote about the issues being experienced with scrapping our RSS feed, numerous spammy sites have been republishing our work and we are clearly feeling the pinch. We decided to revert from using Feedburner to the default WordPress feed (later tonight) to try a work around to fix this issue. We have a few hundred readers subscribing to the feed, we request you to update the feed URI to http://www.headsetoptions.org/feed/ if you stop seeing update from our site feed. Also, I have a personal site which you could subscribe to that will predominantly provide WordPress and design related information. Thank you.

This plugin is probably one of the most useful and valuable tools to have if your site had used WordPress 2.3 ever (even for a day!). The plugin simply points out exploits and shows you the location of the malicious files, which you can then find and easily delete via FTP. You will be surprised how many such hacker installed files you will find, especially in unused themes and plugins (might not pose a threat, but must be removed nonetheless.) And if you are still using WordPress versions older than 2.5.1, you must upgrade immediately, else its only a matter of time before your site will get hacked.

I will be experimenting with partial feeds for the rest of this month. The splogger issues with my content is not yet resolved. I know switching to partial feed is going ass backwards and will inconvenience those who read my blogs on readers, but bear with me while I figure a work around.

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.