Take That For Taking My Writing, Scraper!

Ooh, I'm fired up this morning. I just discovered that someone had copied, launched and Google indexed one of my posts word for word. The one about porridge. I'm guessing they took it from my RSS feed. Now, copyright violations just happen to be one of my hot buttons. If anyone wants to take a little extract of any post of mine and link back, I'm open to the suggestion. But just taking my stuff and putting it on their site to attract people to their Google ads, no contact with me, no linkback, not even any way to contact them on their site, that fairly had me hopping!

At first I was floundering around trying to figure out what to do, but Problogger turned out to be my knight in shining armor. If this ever happens to you just go take a look at Fighting Scrapers With Your Left Jab. That violator has now been reported to Google Adwords for violating copyright and to Google search for using duplicate content. Hopefully that's it taken care of.

Got an RSS feed? Know if anyone is taking your stuff? If you don't know you might want to care because duplicate content can "flag" Google and you might be the one who gets thrown off the search indexing. Bad, bad.

OK, time to calm down. What was it I was going to write about today? Sorry, this hi-jacked my brain cells. I'll try to post something nice, and calm, and gentle later.

The Power of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a neat little tool for the website and blog owner. I won't attempt to explain what Google Analytics does, because Google have cornered the market on doing a good job of that. I will, however, let you know that daily perusal of Google Analytics will not only tell you where your visitors are coming from, and whether anyone at all likes your writing enough to come back, but it can lead to a good few, free laughs!

One of the categories of information provided by Google Analytics is Keywords. You get details of the words people punched into their search engine, which turned up your website/blog and caused them to visit. Am I weird to be fascinated by this? I don't know, but I think it's useful information. For instance would you ever have guessed that the most common reason people reach my blog here is because they are searching for Wizard of Oz Lesson Plans? Try it, search on this phrase, or something similar, and my humble, little blog comes up on the first page of Google results! Well, that may be surprising, but it's not terribly amusing. Hold on, just getting to it...

Here is a list of the more unusual keyword combinations that have found my blog in the three months that I've been blogging:

• as i go a wandering - I hope they got there.
  
• flintstone's premiered-1960 - I don't remember mentioning the Flintstones!
  
• "hedge apple" ethanol - wonder what they were planning...
  
• 10 nice people attributes - apparently people don't know what qualifies as nice any more!
  
• 47d608ad36f318f572b6b4c232 - well, no clue on this one.
  
• arr where's me booty - not on my blog for sure!
  
• canada economy materialism - did I talk about this?
  
• galaxy bits - was this the candy/chocolate galaxy, or are we falling apart?
  
• google analytics zero views - I guess someone wanted to know how to make their blog invisible, which brings us to...
  
• guide to become invisible - I'm lost for words!
  
• i admire you for raising your children - thank you, I appreciate that.
  
• it's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht robbie burns - my favorite - who ever typed such a lo....ng search term?

So, have people used weird search keywords to find YOUR blog? For personal security purposes it might be worth knowing!

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