I am very sad.
I was very happy.
What happened?
I wrote an article that was so useful to people that it immediately got more hits than any other article on this blog. Joy!
I noticed however they all came from their rss readers or other blogs. Nobody got there through search results. So I submitted my blog to google after a test confirmed that google does not really know my site.
I waited some time and then I did the test again with that popular article. What do I see? No search results pointing to me. One to MassiveBlips which is fine with me as they link back to my site and only quote, not copy though I would prefer to see a direct hit. The sad thing was the other result: Some other “blog” took my content without even attributing it to me. This has happened to me before. I produce some guide and people steal it. That is the reason my herbing + alchemy guides have yet to be updated and published on the blog.
The page I am talking of is mostly full of copied content from people like me, Aurik (they took your nice Winter Veil article) or even WoWInsider … I have not looked further. I am angry about this. They even have a funny disclaimer page full of mumbo jumbo legalese just in case someone wants to complain about them copying stuff which clearly shows they know what they are doing (the page is full of gold selling adds). If you want to complain you need to provide them with the following:
A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed;
Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site;
Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material;
Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact you, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail;
A statement that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
So there it is.
When moving my blog here from Blogger I forgot one thing: Creative Commons. It might just have stopped them. Or not. As of today all this blog is licensed under a creative commons license again:
Brought to you by Yashima from “Yashima Plays” @ http://wow.delusions.de
Yashima plays by Yashima is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Commiseration, splogs are a real pain in the arse.
That being said, international copyright law assumes that any publication is copyrighted by its author unless explicitly stated otherwise. The only wow blogger I know of who did this is Matticus.
So even if there was no CC license before, the content is yours.
You also are the copyright owner yourself, and while it’s unlikely that the pieces of gold selling scumbags will actually carry through, don’t hesitate to e-mail them a proper DMCA takedown notice. Also try to see if you can figure out their ISP and copy their abuse@isp contact on the notice.
Last but not least you need to work on your blog’s search engine presence
Gwaendar’s last blog post..Short Update: Pallie and DK in Northrend, one Week to XMas
Thanks so much for the link to the webmastertools and the hint with the wordpress option. I changed that and I’ve checked everything, added everything, installed a sitemaps plugin … maybe one day I’ll be indexed again
Blech, as much as I hate this sort of thing I try, really, to forget about it because I know that, for the most part, I’ll make little impression on them. I know some would describe this as horribly irresponsible and even ‘encouraging’ the behavior but I really do lack the will to fight after years of watching the fight against ‘art thieves’ in communities I’ve been part of.
I don’t usually check my google results at all but a quick google for ‘winter veil’ places me as the 7th result – not too shabby and very much thanks to the others who’ve been linking me from other blogs. I guess I rely on the community to ‘ignore’ linking to these ‘bad’ sites and thus help keep our google rank higher than those who harvest our content unfairly.
/hug
Aurik’s last blog post..Sunday Screenies – Special
The leading reason why blogs are not indexed is that they are not set up to ping the major search services. Make sure your blog’s ping attribute is set to “yes” or the equivalent. Old posts won’t be indexed if you turn on pinging, but you can get them crawled and indexed by linking to them from new posts.
Some bloggers recap their posts on a weekly or monthly basis. Many bloggers do a “best of …” series of articles to recap their favorite or most popular posts.
Michael Martinez’s last blog post..If the universe is 13 billion years old …