How to Kick the Ass of your Image/Content Thief on Blogger and WordPress

Last updated on May 6th, 2018 at 09:52 am

I know how bad you want to kick his ass. Hold on, I will walk you through on this.

I understand it when some bloggers grab contents from other website (with credit to the original source) to populate their blog and keep it active or grab a few lines from a rich content (in form of quote) to explain or lay emphasis on a subject.

I personally do not share interest on the method of which a blogger populate his/her (will be referred to as him in the remaining section of this post) blog, that’s what Google does right? However, copying my content and images with no link or credit pointing to the original source is where I come in.

Just recently, I wrote an article about sticking any web page element/widget on scroll only to find a duplicate of this article on another website. “There is absolutely no need to panic” I said to myself, expecting a big credit to my good work, only to be left disappointed when I couldn’t find any. Good thing I was blogging on the Blogger platform so I kicked his ass and kicked it real bad.

If you are in same situation and your blog is powered by Blogger or WordPress, don’t waste your time telling Google about this or filing a DMCA report. Just cool off, lets show this guy who the boss is.

Make it hell for them

As a pro or newbie blogger you don’t want to see your contents littered around the web without appropriate credits attributed to you. Since some of this ‘content rippers’ won’t give you a link back willingly, you have to get them by force.
While writing your articles always link back to the ones you have published in the past. Try and add as many internal links (relevant to the article) as possible, this way, anyone reading your article elsewhere will know that the article was copied from a different source and eventually visit your website.
Another way of making it hell for your ‘content rippers’ is by water marking and adding personalized branding to your images. Take a look at the image below:
Watermarked & Branded Image
The above image is a wicked way of personalizing your images and informing whoever is reading your post that you are the original writer.
If this guy chooses to remove your links and credits, be fair and

Send him an email

Some of this guys are just simple minded enthusiasts who found interest in your work and didn’t know the appropriate way to share it. So we have to be fair and give him/her the benefit of doubt by sending them an email to add a link to the original source, otherwise, remove the article entirely.
I know most of this sites makes it very difficult to contact them or get their real email address but Google has made things a lot easier by making it possible for Gmail users to contact Google+ users without having their email address. So all you have to do is to find their Google+ profile and send them a message via your Google account.
If this guy doesn’t comply, then

Kick his ass

Let me quickly add this: The guy in my initial illustration was smart enough to restructure my article headline but there is one thing his lazy bones couldn’t let him do – change the images. One of either stupidity or laziness could have been the reason for him not uploading those images to his own server but either way, it was to my own advantage.
The first thing I did was to make duplicates of the images I used on that article and replace those images with the new duplicate. Then I edited them (the original images)  and added the following lines to them “Contents by: EWT Visit www.ewtnet.com”
The next day, I wanted to show the page to a friend only to be greeted with a 404 error page. I tried searching the entire site but alas! The article has been removed by the guy.

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Editing Images on Blogger

I know most of you might be wondering “how the hell is this possible?”. Indeed, it is impossible to edit images you have uploaded to your blog via the Blogger platform but with Google+, it is a sure deal.
  • First, you need to visit your Google+ profile.
  • Click on photos
  • Scroll down to where you have your blog images
  • Click on the image you want to edit and start editing the image.
  • Click Finished Editing when you are done editing your image.
All the changes you made to this image will reflect on any location is being used.

Edting Images on WordPress

In WordPress, the whole process is relatively easier. Just download the images to your PC, edit them and upload them back to the same folder without changing their file names.
  • Login to you FTP account
  • Open /wp-content/uploads/YEAR/MONTH/ folder in your WordPress installation path. Note: YEAR is the year you published the article and same goes for MONTH.
  • Locate and download the images to your PC. To get the file name, right click on your image and click copy image location e.g. If your image name is kickingass and published April, 2013 then your image location will appear like this http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/kickingass . Simply search for the file in correct image folder.
  • After editing this images, upload them to the same folder you downloaded them.
Left to me alone, making it hell for them remain the most effective ways of fighting duplicate content. You don’t necessarily need to break your head if your content is copied (in the case of news and tutorial blogs) by a competitor if it is properly linked and optimized.
View the WordPress and Blogger Tricks section for more tutorials like this one.

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