Protect Your Site's Content

You'll probably recall a couple of months ago when Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain's MySpace page was hacked. McCain's site wasn't really hacked per se, instead whoever had set up the page for McCain had done so using a popular template but instead of using their own hosted files (as was requested), they took the lazy route and simply hotlinked to the template's creator, (who also happenes to be Newsvine founder and CEO) Mike Davidson's hosted images. Since McCain's crew was hotlinking, all Davidson had to do was change the image that was being linked to and viola - McCain had a nice big banner in support of gay marriage (particularly between women) on his page.

This incident got me thinking about who, if anyone, was out there leeching content from my sites. Sure, some are obvious - any site that garners enough traffic would be hard pressed to hide their hotlinking to you, but on plenty of sites small-time leechers likely go unnoticed. If the content is images or video clips bandwidth starts to become an issue as every time someone is on the offending site looking at the content, you're still taking the bandwidth hit for it while getting none of the benefits. This leeching need not just be of images or video either, there are plenty of sites out there now that will steal your content, word-for-word as well.

So what can you do? Well the easiest thing to do is check your analytics program or logs regularly. Note down referring URLs and IP addresses that are suspicious. If you can find these out, programs such as LinkDeny can make sure your site is secure by restricting the offending parties from accessing your site. Even a Google search can sometimes yield some interesting results for content you thought you have full control over. More specifically the site Copyscape allows you to input your URL and it will scan the content on your site then search for matches all over the Internet.

TimeForBlogging has some other great tips on this matter as well.

It's important to protect your site's bandwidth and content especially now in an age where sites like Digg send your content out to thousands of people that in a very short amount of time may write-about, link to, or simply repost your material - simply because they know it's popular and generating traffic. You worked hard on your content, protect it.

[image compliments of Mike Davidson's Newsvine Story...though not hotlinked to]

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Adrienne Doss, May 15, 2007

I was browsing a competitor's inbound links recently, and I noticed they have an .edu link that's actually just a hotlinked image. Does this pass link juice? In other words, can some hotlinking actually benefit you?

Joshua Dorkin, May 15, 2007

Thanks for sharing my post about protecting your copyright with everyone.

Dustin, May 15, 2007

One of the contributors to my blog recently wrote some code (and published it!), that automatically displays a different photo on a site that is leaching content. We've been following sites (splogs) that are leaching our content and the results have been amusing as these sites now display a large notice that they are a splog! :)

The details are on this post: http://www.raincityguide.com/2007/05/11/steel-this-blog-post-friday-fun-with-splog-busters/

MG Siegler, May 15, 2007