Sunday, November 05, 2006

Unwanted Links

I did a link search today for my blog and found myself linked to two sites I don't think I want to be associated with. One is Appetite from New Zealand, I can't tell if it is a spam site or not and the other is definitely just spam. I thought I remembered this question from before, but I couldn't find it on this site. How do I contact the web master and tell them to remove the link? Can I? Has anyone heard of the Appetite site before or know anything about it? My stuff isn't copyrighted. Could I avoid this problem if it was? Thanks for any info!


This Post was written by Meredith from Cooking 101

12 comments:

Kalyn Denny said...

Where the site is just splog (spam + blog) and is linking to your content as a way to lure visitors, if they have google ads you can often get it shut down by clicking on "ads by google", then select "Give Google feedback about the ads you just saw" then choose "report a violation" from the drop down menu and type a message. I type something like "This is not a legitimate web site. They are stealing content put on a page created to host ads."

I know those types of links do disappear from my links in Technorati after I do that, so I assume it's working. Whether their host shuts them down or they just delete the blog when they can't get google ads I don't know.

Meredith said...

Thanks Kalyn! I just did it. Now I'll wait and see.

KT said...

Your stuff IS copyrighted. Any time you create something it becomes copyrighted by you and is protected by copyright law--at least in the U.S.

While putting a copyright notice on your site might discourage people from stealing your content, if all they are doing is linking, then probably nothing will stop them, since linking to your site doesn't violate copyright laws anyway. Kalyn's suggestion sounds like a good way to go, though.

Liz said...

Thanks for posting this. I'm having trouble with this right now (and much as I want more folks to link to me, this kinda thing I don't need!) I'd assumed it was just something that happened that I could do nothing about.

Acme Instant Food said...

And for the REALLY technically uneducated, how does one go about doing a link search?

Liz said...

AIF- if you're on Technorati then it will show you a list every blog that is linked to you.

Meredith said...

For link searches, I also recommend Who Links to Me

Acme Instant Food said...

That was helpful! Thank you Liz and Meredith.

the chocolate doctor מרת שאקאלאד said...

meredith,
I tried looking at wholinkstome, but I saw only the title and a blank screen.

Anonymous said...

You can also use google to do a link search. Type in linkto: and your url (without the http://)

Anonymous said...

Oops, ignore that last post, it should be:

link:yourURL
(no space between the colon and your url)

Meredith said...

Choc Lady,

I know! Right after I posted the link I noticed that WLM isn't working currently. Maybe it'll be back up soon?