What do you do if original content from your website or blog is stolen and republished in full on another site?  You fight back!

A splog or “spam blog” is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes the content on its own blog.  Splogs are created primarily to make money from ads shown on the splog and/or promote affiliated web sites.  Splog owners are too dishonest, lazy or stupid to create their own original content and instead thieve yours.

Splogs are harmful because they effectively steal a portion of your blog’s search engine ranking, traffic and ad revenue.

Read more at DevTopics

Copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery.

What’s a Splog?

A splog or “spam blog” is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes all or some of the content on its own blog.

Splogs are created to promote and increase search engine ranking of affiliated web sites, and/or to make money from ads shown on the splog.  Typically splogs are automated, but they can also be manual copy & paste.  A recent study indicated that 56% of all blogs are spam, and there are over 575 thousand splogs reported.

Read more at DevTopics

Social news sites first became popular when Digg.com launched on the Web in 2004. A social news site enables its users to submit news stories and vote on them. The most popular articles percolate to the top of the list and are rewarded with a huge surge in Web traffic. A candid discussion of each article often appears. The most popular social news sites are Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, which recently hit 2 million registered users. DotNetKicks is an excellent social news site for .NET programming.

As described by TechCrunch, the theory behind social news sites is that the world can do a better job than a handful of editors to determine which news stories people want to read. The problem is that voting by mass consensus often results in the lowest common denominator. Also, many of these sites use super-moderators, which like super-delegates in the Democratic primary, can result in a few key votes overwhelming the will of the majority. On Digg, this means that the most popular stories are usually about Apple, Linux, and Ron Paul.

But social news sites are becoming an increasingly important marketing and public relations tool for companies and especially bloggers. Even a mild Digg can send ten thousand or more fresh viewers per day to your blog and significantly increase your ad revenue. Though these traffic spikes tend to be short-lived, there is often a residual effect of viewers that enjoy your site and return for future visits. Most bloggers will see a persistent traffic increase with each Digg surge. Hence, it’s important to understand how to use social news sites to your blog’s advantage.

Read more at DevTopics

Just a few years back, if you wanted to host a WordPress blog on your own website, you avoided GoDaddy at all costs.  WordPress and other mainstream Web applications simply didn’t work on GoDaddy shared hosting without a lot of extra work.  As a result, GoDaddy quickly gained a reputation as a cheap Web host that’s good only for regular HTML web sites.  Over time GoDaddy support for Web applications improved, but installing WordPress still required extra work.  GoDaddy also introduced automatic installers for WordPress, but the result was usually a non-standard installation and code that was a few versions too old.

Fast forward to today.  With GoDaddy’s new Hosting Connection, you can install the latest version of WordPress and many other Web applications such as Joomla with just a few mouse clicks.  It really couldn’t be much easier.  Following are step-by-step instructions to install WordPress on GoDaddy shared hosting.

Read more at DevTopics

Blogs are becoming an important and prevalent method for software developers to share knowledge, tips and code.  Unlike code-sharing sites that have publication guidelines and restrictions, blogs are typically privately-owned, which gives developers freedom to deliver and format their content in many ways.  But this freedom can also result in a poor experience for the blog reader, ranging from code samples that won’t compile, to the equivalent of a messy desk where nothing useful can be found.

Following are several tips for software developers to write and manage their blogs, and to make the blogs easier to use and navigate for their readers.

Read more at DevTopics

The leading SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sites will tell you that placing an ad after the first post in your blog’s home page is particularly effective.  This is because the ad is essentially embedded in the blog content, hence your readers are less likely to develop “ad blindness” and skip over the ad as usual.  There are some WordPress plugins that will help you do this, but sometimes you need to edit the PHP code directly.

Read more…