Archive for April, 2009

I have recently been the victim of content theft on my bodybuilding and fitness blog, where some unscrupulous website owner stole the content of this article high intensity hill sprint interval training session and posted it on their own blog, as if it were their own content.

At first I was furious at this because their page was ranking in Google before my page was, despite my page being the original content. It turns out however that this is fairly commonplace and happens to lots of bloggers.

I decided that I wasn’t going to stand for it and that I should do something about it. First port of call was Google, to flag it up as duplicate content. To do this, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en and report it. You will need to put in offending URL, then the search that you entered into Google to find the duplicate content (spam) and lastly the Google results page that it brings up. There are a bunch of check-boxes, select “Duplicate site or pages”, then there is a free text box to add in your own words about the problem.

After you’ve submitted the spam request to Google, it’s worthwhile trying to defend against this happening in the future by making some amendments to your WordPress installation. Sorry if you are using other bloggin software, but I have no experience of them so can’t help.

To add a copyright notice and related posts to your feed, download the Copyright Feed plugin from WordPress, install it on your blog, then activate it via the Plugins tab.

Once activated, you will need to go to Settings tab and click on the ©Feed tab to amend the settings. I have added a digital fingerprint to mine. To do this, I just did an MD5 hash of a phrase that is dear to my heart, and I’ve kept a copy of this phrase on my dev server. This means that if I do a search on Google for my digital fingerprint, I should find any offending content thieves - assuming they haven’t removed the digital fingerprint from the content they steal!

I’ve recently added some links on my other blog that I wanted to ensure the paths were not clear to anyone viewing the blog. You may need to do this on your WordPress blog also, so if so, here’s how you do it:

1. Create a directory to store all your external redirect links in. I chose “Go”, but you could call it “Redirect” or “External”.
2. Add a file to this directory, which is simply a php file that contains all the info about your external links. My file is called merchant.php, because I have links out to various merchants from my file.
3. In your redirect file, you will need to have an array of the various different url’s that you want to link to. If you have distinct groups of websites taht you wish to link to, it’s best to have more than one array. Your arrays should be set up so that you have a key and a val, for example: array(key1=>val1, key2 => val2)
4. If you are using more than one array, you will need to pass the array and the key of the url to your redirect script. I used the variable names $a for the array and $n for the number of the key.
5. If you have more than one array, you will need a switch statement, to ensure that you pull the correct url from the correct array, here’s an example of how to do this:

switch ($a)
{
  case “array_1″:
     $url = $array_1[$n];
      header (”Location: $url”);
      exit;
 case “array_2″:
     $url = $array_2[$n];
     header (”Location: $url”);
     exit;

}

6. You will need to acquire the variables $a and $n from the query string, like this:

$a = $_GET['a'];

$n = $_GET['n'];

7. To use this in a post or a page, you’ll need to make your links like this:

<a href=”<?php echo get_bloginfo(’url’); ?>/go/redirect.php?a=array_1&n=1″>Link to redirect urk</a>

8. Upload and test to make sure it works!

Another great fitness blog that I’ve come across is that of Colin Timberlake, a fitness freak from America or Canada. He writes about his running training weight training, giving all the information about what times he does a run in and how much weight and number of reps/sets he does for his weight training.

What is different about this blog, is the numerous inspirational people that Colin writes about, and the reasons that he finds them inspirational. For instance, one of his inspirational figures of the day was Madonna. Not (I’m guessing from what he writes about her) for her personality, but for the fact that at over 50, she is still in very good shape and can most probably out-do most women half her age!

It’s these daily inspirational figures that populate the site, and they range from sports personalities, actors, singers, musicians, fighters and of course, a few choice bodybuilders, including the great Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The site is built using WordPress, or a similar blogging solution. The theme looks to have been custom made or at least an off the shelf theme that has been tweaked to fit in with the author’s content and style.

The design is clean and easy to read, with a two colum design that favours the adverts and navigation on the left hand side and the content on the right hand side. My only issue with this is that the advertising is far more prominent that the website navigation, and there does seem to be an awful lot of advertising and affiliate links.

For instance, the left hand column has two Google Adwords text ad blocks, a Doubleclick image ad block and two Amazon widgets that contain affiliate links to various fitness related books and inspirational (or just preferred viewing) films chosen by the arthur. I’m not against monetising a blog, but I don’t believe it should be done at the expense of the navigation.

I would also argue that the Google ads may be more successful if they were integrated into the blog posts, as would the Amazon affiliate links, if they were integrated into the posts and related, so for instance, if he wrote about how Madonna inspires him, he could have an affiliate link to Amazon to a Madonna products page, which could contain books, cd’s and dvd’s of hers.

In terms of the search engine optimisation that has been done on the website, I can’t see that any major sins have been committed. There are no spammy site-wide links which is good, but there is also no tag cloud, which is bad, purely from the point of view that he could be missing out on some easy long tail traffic. I know from my own blog that I get a bunch of random search engine traffic that is directly resulted from my tag cloud.

Last thing to say on the SEO side of things is that the author hasn’t disabled the blog title from each title tag. This means each page title has “| colintimberlake.com” appended to it, which neither adds any extra meaning to the visitor nor the search engines, and in fact will reduce the relevance of the words in the title tag. A small issue that can be resolved easily, and may as well be to maximise the benefit of on-page optimisation.

What would make the biggest difference to the search engine optimisation efforts of Colin’s blog would be to get more links coming into the blog. I could only see six inbound links according to Google, and as the blog has been online since January, that’s measly 1.5 links gained per month so far.

All in all though, it’s a well written blog, the title’s of each page are well thought through to include varying keywords and each page of content contains the keywords and is good quality content which search engines just love.