Hundreds of pages of my content and photos have been stolen by a Turkish website http://homedepotgarden.net. They have also stolen content from other garden bloggers and Garden Design Magazine.
I have reported them to Home Depot since the site is obviously trying to obtain the page ranking from that company and stealing the use of their name.
I have reported them to Google by submitting a spam report for http://homedepotgarden.net. What Google can do is remove them from their page ranking index so that when someone searches for garden information, they will not be pointed to that site.
It appears that site is building up as they hit 126 pages of my blog today alone. I expect them to try to get approval for using ads on their site to try to make money off of ad clicks. That is usually the scheme for such a site.
Fortunately, I have been putting my name at the end of my blog posts for over a year now. So, my content can be identified as mine. However, the content stolen from others has no identification. There are no blog names, no link backs to the original writers.
Right now, I am reposting older stories of mine instead of writing new content for them to steal.
You will notice that for the last few days, I've added a hyperlink to my name where I have a list of published articles as well as a hyperlink back to my blog. By including this in the text of my posts, stolen content will carry the link back here unless the thieves go to the trouble to break the links.
Fellow bloggers - I recommend that each of you start adding your blog name at the bottom of every post and include a hyperlink back.
For now, I am going to turn off comments.
Thank you for your patience.
Written for Defining Your Home Garden and Travel