Mike's Tech Blog

Recently, I discovered that one of my articles had been stolen and published on someone else's blog. Of course, I was upset that my article was stolen. I tried to contact them, and they ignored me. So in order to protect the articles on my blog, here are some

As always, the first thing you should do is contact the other person and ask them to remove your content from their site. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. For me in this particular case, it didn't work. So now it was time for some action of my own.

In looking at the person's site that stole my blog content, I noticed that he was hotlinking the images from his site to my site! Wow! not only was he stealing my blog content, he was also using MY bandwidth for the images on his site!

OK, since this guy is stealing my images on my site, I can use this against him. What I did was I created a very obnoxious image that said "This article was STOLEN from www.mikestechblog.com". Then every image that he was using from MY site, I just copied it over with the EXACT filename that was in the original article. Now when people went to HIS site, instead of viewing the correct images that went along with the article, they saw the image posted at the start of this article. Now for my article on my blog, I just renamed the images on my site, and in the article to something else..

OK so much for that guy, now what to do to prevent future articles from being stolen. A lot of web hosting providers use an application called Cpanel for their web host management software. Chances are very good that yours does too. This is also what my web host provide uses, which allows me to manage my website. One of the options in the Security section is Hotlink Protection. I have circled it in the image below:

So click on Hotlink Protection, and in the next window, you will see a dialog box that is titled: URLs to allow access: Make sure your own domain is listed here, or your images won't show up on your own page!

Notice in the window labeled Block direct access for these extensions should have the usual image file extensions listed. However there is a little used extension for JPEG images, and that is .JPE. So then just make your own image similar to mine at the top of this article, and give it a .JPE file extension. In doing so, will allow sidestepping of the hotlink protection we just set up. Then upload it to your website.

Lastly, near the bottom, is a dilog box labeled Redirect request to this URL: enter the full path to the image you just uploaded, then click the Submit button, and you are done!

So what do you do if your website doesn't use Cpanel? What Cpanel is really doing is modifying your .htaccess file on your website. So you can just do that yourself if you like. Before you modify your .htaccess file, make a backup first! then just copy and paste the following into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?mikestechblog.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ imageBlocked.jpe [NC,R,L]

Notice the tw parts that are underlined above. You will need to change these to fit your web site. For example where it says: mikestechblog.com, you would change it to your website. Also the ImageBlocked.jpe part you would change to the filename of your blocke image file you uploaded.

Also, on all of your images, make them a hyperlink back to your original article, also add a couple of random hyperlinks within the ext of your article pointing back to your original article. What these two tricks will do is even if someone still steals your blog content, you will at least get a couple of links pointing to your article. This will improve your SEO ranking, and lower the ranking of the person that stole your article! so in the end if your articel still gets stolen, you will gain some backlinks to your blog.

Lastly, add the following at the end of each of your articles with a link back to the original article:

This article was originally posted on www.mikestechblog.com Any reproduction on any other site is prohibited and a violation of copyright laws.

OK, I hope this helped you out. Good luck!

-- Mike

This article was originally posted on www.mikestechblog.com Any reproduction on any other site is prohibited and a violation of copyright laws.