Dear Readers,
I hosed myself. Twice. I am a double self-hoser!
A couple of months back, I found out that there was a scraper site (http://asianfood.aqimg.com/) stealing the House of Annie’s (and several other food blogs’) content. With no contact info on the owner, there was little I could do to get them to stop. It wasn’t like the other scraper site I dealt with, who was hosted on Blogspot.
But I tried to file a DMCA report anyway, to see if the mighty Google could help.
Hosed
Unfortunately, I screwed up and told Google that the infringing content was located on the chezannies.blogspot.com domain, while the original content was on the scraper’s domain. (Serves me right for not reading the form carefully.) When I realized my mistake, I sent an email to Google notifying them of my error. I also filed a corrected DMCA form. Then I hoped for the best.
Today, Google informed me that they had taken down the reported content…ON THE HOUSE OF ANNIE SITE. And then in a separate email they informed me that I can file a counter claim to get the content added back.
Say it with me: AAAAUUUUUUGGGGHHHHH!!!
I sent an email back to Google, saying I made a mistake and could they please reinstate my posts. Thankfully, they read the email and replied, saying I could take the posts out of Draft and republish them. Whew!
Double-Hosed
But then in my haste to get everything back online, I published all those posts without making sure they went back at the correct date. So that was why for about an hour, it looked like I had published about 20 posts today. And why a bunch of them got sent to you RSS readers.
I frantically went back and corrected the dates. I think everything is back to normal, and hopefully there was minimum confusion to those of you out there in RSS land.
To our dear readers: Sorry about that.
To the scraper site: I hate you.
To Google: It was my bad for not reading the form properly. Thanks for doing what I asked, twice.
To self: Get off BlogSpot, you hoser!
Aloha, Nate
Aiaiai, my sympathies. Scraper sites and DMCA forms are the WORST!
yipes, glad you got everything straightened out.
Oh no! So glad everything got put back in order. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the armpits of scraper sites (er, their human owners).
Nate,
How do you know if your site as been scraped? As a new blogger, this is a new one for me — I haven't heard of this before.
There is always a fly in the ointment. In this case, fly larvae.
hey glad that you got everything back in order! no worries abt the RSS updates… strangely i didnt get bombarded with them though, you must have fixed it before they sent it to me. 🙂
Sorry to hear this happened to you, but I'm confused about why being on Blogspot had anything to do with it? Seems to me that Google would be extra helpful to Blogger users (since they now own Blogger.)
@all – thanks for your comments!
@Andrea – 😀
@Kathleen – Google alerts me when it finds a site mentioning "House of Annie". Most of the time it's another blogger. This time, it was the scraper reposting my content.
@Kalyn – if I wasn't on BlogSpot, Google couldn't have taken my posts down.
Arrrghhh. So sorry! Darn scrapers screwing up everything!
Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Good to know everything is back in control now.
That's annoying, sorry you have had to deal with that.
Oh my gawd! Poor you! What a hassle that has been. I hate it when content is stolen like that. You'd think people would have a conscience, but I guess not. Sigh.
A-YAH!!!!!!! Good thing everything is back to normal now.
Wow, what a nightmare. I wouldn't know where to begin if that happened to me. I don't even know what a DMCA form is.
Hey Nate & Annie,
Scraper sites are a real pest. Sometimes you will be able to trace some of them and deal with them but sometimes, you can't. If it's a blogger site, you could easily get Google to deal with them but what if it is their own hosting? There's really nothing you can do.
SO.
One of the best ways to deal with it is to always add a link back to your site right in the first sentence of your posts. This way, when they scrape your content and paste on their sites, they will also be copying your link. And in a way, you are getting a link back to your site. That is if they used an automated scraper system and did not bother to remove any links that comes with the content they used.
Hope this helps.
~ Foong of thefoodsite.net ~
Oh…noooo!!! Glad you got everything sorted out. Thanks for sharing!
Sorry to hear about the issues you had because of some stupid scraper. Many of us have been through that, and it isn’t fun to think about someone trying to profit off your hard work.
Always linking back to your site, as was previously suggested is a good idea. Another solution is to put a unique string in your RSS feed, if possible, that way when some scrapes your site, you can easily perform a search for that string in a search engine. If the scraper’s post is indexed, you should be able to find it using that string you added.
I do try to put a link back to a previous post, somewhere in the first paragraph or two of a new post. I suppose that can be tracked as a trackback or something.