Blogging Tips

One week ago I wrote about how you can fight back against the scrapers, the content stealing scamming idiots who rip off posts from hard working bloggers. Since then, BloggingTips has unfortunately been scraped a few more times.

A blog about nothing, Elina from MyLlilAdventure and David from Pure Blogging were all kind enough to send me an email about two sites they found scraping me. Thanks guys, I really appreciate your support

The blogs which are scraping me are Blogging Orientated and Riza’s Site (dont worry, I’ve added the nofollow tag to these links!). Both sites are currently scraping every post which is published here. I have contacted Multiply about Riza’s site and I plan on faxing a letter to Google regarding Blogging Orienated. That site is using blogger so is covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It’s a bit of a pain that Google want you to fax a letter or send it by snail mail but at least they will do something about it.

htaccess code for preventing hotlinking

I had not got round to protecting my images from hotlinking sites until today but after seeing every one of my posts scraped by idiots I thought enough is enough, let’s have fun with these scumbags! There is only so much you can do when someone steals your content but stopping them hotlinking your images is something you do have control over.

I have used htaccess to protect hotlinking on several sites in the last few years however for those sites I stopped all sites from hotlinking. For Blogging Tips I only want to stop the domains I specifiy so I followed Surprise Highway’s excellent guide ‘How To Stop Hotlinking and Bandwidth Leeching‘ (I recommended this in my previous article too).

Here is the code I added to my htaccess file to stop them hotlinking images in the posts they are scraping.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.+\.)?multiply.com/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.+\.)?blogspot.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/images/hotlinker.gif
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png|avi)$ http://www.bloggingtips.com/images/hotlinker.gif

As you can see from the above code, I have blocked Blogger (Blogspot) and Multilply bloggers from hotlinking images here. I could have blocked all sites but for now I’m happy to just block the domains of scrapers I find. However, the above code didn’t work 100%, I checked BloggingTips on a newsreader and quickly noticed that the hotlinking image was being displayed there which is obviously not what I want.

I went back to Google and started searching for some htaccess tutorials. Thankfully I soon came across this article which said that you had to add the line below so that everyone else will still be able to link to the images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

The code I added to my htaccess file now looks like this :

RewriteEngine on

# Attempt to stop hot linking from these specific sites
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.+\.)?multiply.com/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.+\.)?blogspot.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/images/hotlinker.gif
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png|avi)$ http://www.bloggingtips.com/images/hotlinker.gif

Now that we have got the correct code, we can now design an image which will be displayed in the scrapers blogs.

The image

The image I designed to show on the images in my posts was this :

Of course you could be more specific, you could write ‘This site is scraping content from my site’ or something like that. It’s really up to you.

Seeing it in action

Let’s see it in action!

* I’ve used my RSS post which I wrote 3 days ago and used the Blogging Orienated scraping site for this illustration.

Content Stealing blog before I edit my htaccess file

Content Stealing blog with my superhero hotlinking image displayed

Increase the size of your hotlinking image

It’s worth noting that the image you specify to be displayed on sites which hotlink your image will be displayed in full ie. it doesn’t matter if your hotlinking image is 200 pixels in width or 300, the full image will be displayed. There is one limitation to this though.

Have a look at the screenprint below :

900 pixels in width and 460 pixels in height. It’s perhaps not too clear at first glance what has happened in the above screenprint but if you look closely you will see that the hotlinking image has been cut off. The reason for this is simple, the hotlinking image was too large for the content area.

Two things to note about this :

• The image does not get cut off vertically ie. you could make your hotlinking image 3000 pixels in height if you wanted.
• The hotlinking image did not expand to 900 pixels on this blog because the blog theme was coded correctly in CSS. Quite a lot of blog themes have problems with images which are too large therefore on another blog the image may have expanded to 900 pixels (ie. they would have expanded over the set content area)

If someone is stealing your content on a regular basis I suggest you get in the habit of placing images in your posts (smilies will do!). Then all you need to do is design a 5000 by 5000 pixel hotlinking image. See how long the scrapers will rip your site off if you do that!!!

Seriously, by making your hotlinking image large in height you are not only telling the scrapers website visitors that the content is stolen, you are also making it very difficult for anyone to read your article on their site.

Summary

Having your blog posts ripped off is frustrating, very frustrating. However, if you get in the habit of placing images in your posts and update your htaccess file to stop hotlinkers you will be able to annoy the scrapers and discourage them from stealing your content.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, stopping other people from hotlinking your images is something you do have control over so I encourage you all to bear this in mind if your content is being ripped off.

As always, if you have any questions regarding any of this, please let me know and I’ll do my best to help.

Good luck,
Kevin

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Articles referenced in this post :

Fighting back against the scrapers (My post about blog scraping last week)
Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Blogger – A google information page telling you how you can report scrapers who are using the Blogger platform.
How To Stop Hotlinking and Bandwidth Leeching – The first htaccess hotlinking tutorial I referenced.
Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention – The second htaccess hotlinking tutorial I referenced which showed us how to limit our hotlinking image to the domains we want.