A few weeks ago I came across a video where the owner of the YouTube channel was recommending that all of us should do an audit of our YouTube channels. Her belief was that all of us should find out what our visitors have viewed the most and try to find ways to create more content around those topics.
I used to get visitors
https://youtu.be/_Ny-Eih158w
If you watched the video (if you didn’t, why not? lol), you see I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t crazy about doing the types of videos that got the most views over the years. Still, it was an interesting project, and I did more research on the channel which I’m going to share in a later video.
It got me thinking about this blog and how the search engines view this site. More specifically, I wondered what backlinks or other sites that might be sharing my domain name. Were they going to be blogs I’ve commented on? Were they going to be people I’ve given interviews to? Was I going to find things I didn’t want to see or approve of? Let’s find out!
I went to Google (of course I did) and typed in imjustsharing.com without quotation marks. It came up with over 74,000 references; ouch! I had a feeling all of them might not be specifically about my site, and I figured there must be a lot of duplicates. That’s because even though it listed 74K references, there were only 3 pages of links showing. Since I have Google show me 50 links per page, I knew it was somewhere between 100 and 150 that came up.
Before I go on, I want to mention one thing in particular. Almost none of the sites whose links I’m going to share I’m not making clickable. I figure that since they found me for their purposes it’s not necessary. If I share any that’s clickable, it’s because I approve of it.
The first thing that came up was my blog; that was nice! lol The next 22 links were to specific articles from this blog. What was interesting is that there was a mix of old and new… mostly links to older articles. I can’t explain that one, but at least Google doesn’t totally hate me.
Next, I found a bunch of sites that are website ranking sites. Some are active whereas others are a couple of years behind. All of them have different numbers because of when they did their ranking search. Here’s what I found:
http://websites.milonic.com gave me 1/2 star out of 5 because I have a low ranking on StumbleUpon and Google Plus. Let it’s showing the image of my last post on this blog; that’s kind of weird;
https://website.informer.com scanned this site two days ago and gives me an Alexa rank around 255K. I have a 72% trust rating and a 78% child safety rating, and it says my site is good; I can live with that. I’m not so sure I like that it knows where I bought my domain name or where I’m hosting my site, but I’ll take the blame for that since I’m not paying either site the extra money to hide that information from them.
websiteoutlook.com last scanned my site in July 2019, and it shows my Alexa rank at the time around 1.2M. It shares a lot of information like the site above, but it also evaluates this site as being worth $2K; I’m not sure whether to be happy or insulted by that. lol
Next, I found my blog on a bunch of sites highlighting the fact that this is a “dofollow” or “CommentLuv” blog. I’m listed with a bunch of other websites, and I have little doubt that these are the types of sites that generate a lot of the spam I receive. I’m betting that many of you probably have your links on these sites as well. Here are some of those sites:
https://www.alltechabout.com
https://medium.com/@atul221137/free-dofollow-backlink-and-nofollow-backlinks-submission-sites-2019-599fcc048b78 (because it’s on Medium I had to include the entire link)
https://www.akdteck.xyz
https://www.bloggingden.com
https://e-businessinindia.blogspot.com/
https://www.newtechytips.com
https://hariforyou.com
That’s a lot, isn’t it? That’s not close to all of them, but it shows you what most of us are probably dealing with. I’m going to think hard about eliminating dofollow on both CommentLuv & this blog in general. I’ve never wanted to do it but the amount of spam I get is bothersome.
Next was a guest post I wrote for my friend Marcie Hill back in 2012 titled 5 Steps Towards Blogging Integrity. I think it’s a pretty good article, and it deserves being promoted again, even though it’s 7 1/2 years old. 🙂
After that, an interview I did with Olawale Daniel in 2011. Olawale hasn’t written a new article since September 2019, but I felt I accounted for myself well enough to share it again.
This one was interesting, but I’m not highlighting the link. It’s on this site, https://joanmatsuitravelwriter.com/overcoming-bloggers-block-other-blogging-conversations-with-marcie-hill/, and its basically highlighting where I interviewed Marcie Hill (above) on my YouTube channel talking about her book 62 Blog Posts To Overcome Blogger’s Block, which I reviewed in 2012 (I’m in the book lol). The weird things are the content has nothing to do with the niche of the blog and it was posted in 2018. There’s also not really an article, so I have the feeling it was scraped.
The final site I’m sharing is an article scrapping site, which many these days like to refer to as content syndication. This is the link to the page, although it might not exist when you read this article: https://muckrack.com/t-t-mitchell/articles. I’d never heard of the site, but they say their purpose is to help writers and authors get the word out and hopefully help them connect to publishers.
That sounds well and good, only I didn’t ask for the help and I’m not necessarily happy that someone’s sharing that much content from this site. I wrote them and asked them to remove my content, but there’s a caveat. You can have them totally remove all of your content, but they can’t guarantee that someone else won’t add it later on. Or you can ask them to remove the page but keep all the content they’ve already collected… somewhere… to insure that no one can add it again.
I don’t quite like either of those choices but I went for #1, killing everything and taking a chance on someone adding my link again. I don’t mind someone asking me if they can share something I’ve written and will give me link and writing credit, but I want to be notified and approve the site first.
That’s a good sampling of what I found. I’ve done this in previous years, and I always seem to find at least one site scraping my content. I’ve always been on a lot of lists showing that my blogs are dofollow and Commentluv friendly. I’m not going to say I’m all that popular because of he 74K, but it’s nice not being ignored… I guess… 🙂
Do you have the nerve to see how Google sees your blog or website? Let me know if you do and what you find.
Actually, it turns out Google doesn’t have as big a problem with duplicate content as they used to. When you think about it, many people are sharing their content in other places these days like on Medium. It’s us who needs to have a problem with it if it’s not us doing it because sometimes our content shows in somewhere else under someone else’s name while they’ve taken everything else we put on our blog; that’s irksome as heck!
o your site is listed on the Internet, and your content is shared elsewhere. This is all normal. It is the risk we take from the moment we decide to have a website and we publish quality content that interests readers and other bloggers.
It’s a risk and it’s to be expected, but it doesn’t have to be tolerated. Whenever I find my content elsewhere, especially when they’ve scraped my personal images, I go after them with an iron fist. DMCA is a wonderful thing; I’ve had websites shut down when owners haven’t complied. I figure I don’t write articles so I can end up competing against my own content later on; ain’t gonna happen in my world.
Hey Mitch, I’m surprised there aren’t any links from wassupblog. I know I’ve linked to you heaps of times. I just googled my blog and there are only 8000 results. At least Wassup has listed first LOL.
All in all an interesting exercise.
Maybe they disappeared when your database crashed. It’s weird that none of my comments showed up in the search, but I probably had to type my entire email address in to see that. You’re right though, it’s interesting to see what happens.
Hi Mitch – guess which site comes up on page 1 for my site? Your interview of me! I had no idea until I googled inspiretothrive – Interesting, right?
Even more interesting is that your site was first after my site and the social media pageas I have. Wow.
Very cool Mitch and I look forward to hearing about YouTube as I’m doing more videos than ever.
I hope you are well and stay safe there as well as your mom! Take care.
See how cool that is? I bet if you promoted it consistently on Twitter it would end up in the top 5. That’s actually what I was hoping to see since I promote all the interviews I’ve given over the years. That the only one that popped up was from 2011 is interesting; I wonder where the others are.
I have accepted over the years that people scraping is a compliment. Otherwise, I’d go mad! 😉
We have interviewed many people on our blog. Would you be interested in an interview for our blog on self development?
I don’t go mad, I make them go mad instead. In this case, I found the one site, but if I was totally irritated I could have found a lot more.
An interview might be interesting. Look at my About page and you’ll find my email address.
Of course, I took up your challenge because my site is only 2 months old. Why should I be afraid at this point? However, I was stunned to see that my domain has over 1,000,000 results. This is absolutely crazy.
But the good news is that Google has just indexed my newest post (which was published less than 4 hours ago at the time of writing this comment).
How a two-months-old domain has over a million results delude me.
It’s possible that in today’s world where so many people are fretting over a virus that they’re looking for inspiring words of comfort. It can be startling to see how many people you’re connected to in such a short period of time.
Hey Mitch, you bring up some valid points. My website is a little over four months old. I write blogs/articles to create more content and help my website rank better, is this a good way to approach being a new business owner?
Since I know you’re not Amber, I’m going to assume you’re a paid commenter, especially since I know you’re not Amber, especially using a Yahoo email address. In any case, I’m going to quickly answer this question because others might ask the same thing.
Creating more content is one way to keep one’s business in the eyes of the search engines. Another is promoting on social media to encourage others to share your content if it applies to them. The last is commenting on other blogs where what you’re writing about might encourage them to visit your blog and comment, then possibly share.It doesn’t necessarily have to be within your niche, but it has to be compelling enough to get people interested.
That’s it.
Great article Mitch.I get your concern and you are right about it.I have the same but i didn’t knew how to reduce spam on my blogs.
There are a number of plugins that could help you a bit. One’s called Stop Spammers, another’s called GASP Anti-Spambot. You can also pay for Akismet to help you out. Give those a try.