Herself’s Webtools

A few weeks back I found some trackbacks on my Houston Garden Blog that had been pulled by Akismet as spam. I didn’t think they were spam but it took a few days before I could investigate.

I traced them back to a Splog who was and probably still is scraping garden blogs and stealing posts. Posts are published in part not full and link back to the original blog. The reason it is done this way is two fold. By publishing part posts key words are denser. Publishing the trackback link creates a link back to the splog increasing incoming links.

What can you do?

First delete the trackback link so there isn’t a link to that splog. Or put a link somewhere to that blog but put ’spam’ or ’splog’ as the reference in the link.

Block the IP number. .htaccess lets you do this easily. Add the following to your .htaccess file:
Deny from 192.168.0.1

But replace the 192.168.0.1 with the spam IP address. How to block users from accessing your site based on IP. Mostly you have to pay attention and catch thieves as quickly as you can. The less profitable this business becomes, the less we’ll see it.

Also prevent hotlinking of your images.

Another thing to do is to try to include a hard link in every post to another post on your blog. That way if the content is republished you might at least get a link back to yourself.