Sometimes people leave comments on my site, but mis-type the link to their blog, and I have to do a bit of detective work or googling to find their blog. Some examples are – they leave out “.blogspot” or “www.” or “.com”.
However lately I have noticed some instances of a disturbing possible trend.
URLs of a couple of popular food blogs have been “mimicked” by either
- removing the “www” at the beginning of the URL
e.g. www.foodblog.org is a food blog,
whereas foodblog.org is a “mimicked” URL of a site owned and operated by someone else, and not necessarily about food.
or
- doing the reverse – adding a www. to a foodblog that does not have one in the URL (ie is a subdomain).
or
- transposing two of the letters in the URL
e.g. foodblog.blogspot.com is a foodblog,
but foodblog.blogpsot.com is another site altogether.
Question?
Have you noticed any examples of this?
Be careful when entering a link to your blog
The reason that this works for the people who are “mimicking” the URLs is probably because we can be a bit careless at times when entering a link to our blog, especially in comments.
What to do?
Firstly, be really careful when linking to your blog – make sure you are entering it correctly. Periodically, test out your link to make sure that it goes to the site that you intended.
If a blogger notices that their URL has been “mimicked”, what should they do? What do you think?
I suspect it is not limited to food blogs. Looking forward to your thoughts.
Other Posts:
3 responses so far ↓
planetross // April 20, 2008 at 11:12 am |
I don’t think you can do anything about a mimicked blog url. Possibly the suspected mimicked url may have had their url first.
A musician friend of mine has his music for sale on a site: he receives a certain amount of money everytime someone downloads one of his songs. He also receives a royalty for every click on his name (not much, but a few cents). Supposedly there is one musician whose name is very similar to a famous musician, and he has made some pretty good money from people mistakenly typing in his name: ie. Bryan Adams/Ryan Adams.
Romina // April 21, 2008 at 7:03 am |
I find for the most part it is due to a bit of ignorance on the part of commenters, they simply don’t know that there is a difference between say http://www.____.blogspot.com and http://____.blogspot.com. Many people are either not careful or simply don’t have the knowledge to understand the difference, they may be new to the blogging or internet worlds.
I think you are right. I guess this post was a call to be a little more careful, and there are sites that are taking advantage of that, and of the power of google. Some of the sites that I have seen have been harmless enough, but one really did conflict with the ideologies of the owner of the food blogger.
Srivalli // May 27, 2008 at 8:59 pm |
Thank you for this post J. In my case, both with the www or without takes to my blog but the problem is, the blogspot is changed somehow. I know for sure I have never typed in wrong. Was looking at ways to curb this. Should investigate more on this!
It is really weird what was happening to your URL. I always corrected it whenever I saw it. Hope you can track down the cause.