How You Can Too!
Regular readers know I have been fighting a controlling addiction to statistics. What you may not know is, though I spent a little time "on the wagon" only checking my stats once a day, I have recently fallen back into my old habit of checking my stats constantly.
Yes, as I've seen written around the blogosphere, I meet all of the qualifications of a "stats addict". This obsession, however, led me to discover one of the most hated things on the internet, a scraper blog. A scraper blog with my content on it!
How?
I used to wonder how someone would catch a scraper using their content. I always thought it would be through Technorati or finding a search return with your content on it, not in my case. I found my thief with my FeedBurner stats.
Where Is Your Feed Going?
FeedBurner gives you the ability to find out any time your feed is being used for something other than being read by a feed reader or delivered in email. These non reader uses are called "Uncommon Uses" and are available on your FeedBurner dashboard.
Simply log into your FeedBurner account and go to your dashboard. In the left hand navigation column select the Uncommon Uses button and click it.
You will receive a screen like the one above. This page will show any non-reader loads of the feed such as MyBlogLog, BlogSkinny and any of the other directories I am registered with. A you can see, for this day, it shows feeds2read.net and the scraper site. Feeds2read.net is one of the feed directories this blog is registered with and is not a problem. If there are no uncommon uses it will say exactly that.
Protect Your Blog
We all spend entirely too much time creating the content that fills our blogs to allow it to be stolen without a fight. When you feed your stats addiction every day, add a new stat into the mix. Right after you check Technorati to see who linked to you, click over to FeedBurner and check to see where your feed went as well.
If you enjoyed your read, grab my feed!
5 comments:
interesting I never use feedburner I didn't really know thats how you did it.
So once you catch a scraper, what can you do to them? (That will actually make them stop).
@ Shaun - One more reason to run your feed through FeedBurner.
@ Bush - I honestly don't know. My post called them out and linked to their own posts. If the scrape was working, that post would have gone up on their blog.
There were some heavy hitters that were being scraped by that blog. I wouldn't be surprised if someone with more clout than me shut them down.
We'll never know :)
Wow - I didn't know that could be used. I'm not too crazy about stats (just yet) so this is something definitely worth exploring. :)
YC - Yeah, I'm not that big on stats eith pphhthtt! Cough.. hack...sputter!!!
Sorry, I couldn't even type that without choking!
Deffinately worth checking out.
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