SoloSEO

Report Content Theft! Submit and View Domains That Steal Content

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

I’m sick of trackbacks to my blog from other sites that steal my content. Sure they “cite” me with a link, but it doesn’t count when you say “submitted by kaker” and then link to me, and it doesn’t count even if you link to me and say “read more”. If you’re just quoting me or commenting on a post, you are not stealing my content.

So, I thought I’d start keeping track of these content thieves, and I wanted to let you too!

Report Content Theft and View Domains That Steal Content

I’d love it if someone took this one step further on this and made a wordpress plugin. The plugin would:

1) Add to this list when you find a site that does this.
2) Block any comments/trackbacks from this site
3) Reports to some blacklist somewhere?

I’m not worried about getting out-competed by these slimeballs, but I don’t want someone monetizing on my hard work and tainting my name with their unethical practices.

6 comments Visited 7292 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Yes, you SHOULD Submit a Sitemap to Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

While others have spoken against submitting your sitemap to Google et al., I am going to stand up for sitemaps all across the web, and give you several good reasons for having a sitemap (now you can do sitemap autodiscovery instead of submitting).

1) Get to know your site - Every site owner should know what a sitemap is and to have at least physically seen what it looks like and glance at the pages it contains. Many sitemaps, interestingly, end up with images, favicons, and stylesheets listed in them, which is not what the sitemap is intended for.

2) Improves index freshness - If you blog once or twice a day, run a news site, or have user-generated content, your sitemap can help search engines get familiar with your pace so their index keeps up nice and fresh.

3) Trust and Credibility - Although probably not a huge factor, submitting a sitemap does show to search engines you are real, exist, and care enough to create a sitemap. I doubt the majority of the spam sites that steal blog posts (mine and yours) for their own content actually use and submit a sitemap. My philosophy is that anything that can improve credibility and trust with a search engine is a good thing, especially when establishing a new domain.

Some people have complained about seeing pages drop out of the index because of submitting a sitemap, and then once they remove it they see an increase. There’s a nice thread over at digitalpoint on this topic. Ultimately I don’t think it’s necessarily your sitemap. The number of pages indexed can fluctuate week to week for any site. And if there is a huge drop in pages, you may want to consider checking out your sitemap to see if it is giving full coverage to all the pages of your site.

So my opinion is yes, you should submit a sitemap. Some people think the search engines are “evil”, but they’re really trying to deliver a fantastic product that users will enjoy and use. They’re not trying to “trick” us by asking for a sitemap. They have spent millions of dollars supporting the ability to submit a sitemap, and its not so they can drop pages from their index. They want to be better and they want you to be better.

So go ahead, create a sitemap!

If you need some help creating a sitemap, sign up for SoloSEO where you can easily create and update your sitemap. There are also many other tools out there, although we think ours is pretty slick.

2 comments Visited 5470 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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How to Configure Sitemap Autodiscovery in Robots.txt

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

At Search Engine Strategies New York it was announced that you can now have your sitemap automatically discovered by configuring it in your Robots.txt file. It is simple and easy to do, you’ll just need to know the URL or web address of your sitemap.

First, open your Robots.txt file on your server for editing. Then you will need to add the following line to the end of the file (it can be anywhere, but the end is probably a good place).

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Save the Robots.txt file with the new line for the sitemap URL. There you go! Your whole file may look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /somefolder/
Disallow: /somethingelse/
Sitemap: http://www.soloseo.com/sitemap.php

Search engines already come to your Robots.txt file when they visit your domain, so on their next crawl they will automatically find your sitemap file.

If you have a new site/domain you will probably still want to submit the sitemap URL to the search engines. To submit you can either submit the URL through their interfaces or use a ping.

Submit Sitemap to Google or Ping Google with your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to Yahoo or Ping Yahoo with your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to MSN Live.com
Info for Ask.com Sitemaps or Ping Ask.com by hitting this address: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

10 comments Visited 13007 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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