When people steal your content

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share what happened to me this week so you never have to go through what I went through.

If you have a website or blog that utilizes google adsense, make sure to click on the option to only allow certain websites to show your ads. If the only place you want your ad to show is on your website, make sure to enter your url.

I didn't even know about this option until google notified me on Wednesday that they were disabling my adsense account due to a url they sent me. I went to this url and got a message it was a trojan horse. I had to see what it was anyway. Apparently, someone copied my entire home page from cake-decorating-corner.com, along with my google adsense code, and overlayed random tractor related keywords all over it. At first, I thought only this page was the problem and then as I clicked on other links, I realized that this site used my home page on every single page, doing the exact same thing.

In a panic, I spent 2 days going over every page in my site. You may want to check your site with copyscape to see if there are any duplicates. People are constantly stealing content and you may not know about it until your website drops in its ranking because google doesn't know which site displayed that content first.

So, that was my really fun week. There's no end to the unpleasant surprises that happen on the internet and I just wanted to save you guys from having to go through it.