BLOGGERS BEWARE !

We garden bloggers are a closely knit group. Thanks to Mr. Brown Thumb I discovered that I had been scraped. Scrapers need content to feed their contextual ads such as Google AdSense. They use multiple keywords and they steal articles that help them rank high in search engine results.

I'm not the only blogger being scraped ( of all places in Istanbul, Turkey ) by Homedepotgarden.net. I'm guessing he thought that the name Home Depot would generate a lot of hits . I found Cameron of Defining your Home and Garden and other garden blog posts without any credit so I'm not sure who they belong to.

What steps can you take to try to stop scraping or at least make it more difficult for them? First sign up to have your work licensed at Creative Commons. If the scraper uses Google you can report them by visiting Google.com, type in their domain in the search field and when it finds the site, go to report a spam result and follow instructions.

Next you can find the scrapper's web host by visiting Whoishostingthis.com and type in the domain in their search box. Visit the scrapers web hosting company and leave them an email.

I'm hoping to get this scraper banned from AdSense, Google and the web host. Copy this, Home Depot Garden.