You see, there's a couple of sites in China that decided they needed some English text so they grabbed the text from one of my blog posts. That kind of junk is to be expected in the wildness that is the Net. I'm quite sure they happened upon my site and chose the text totally at random because of how it's used. It's filler text.. hidden from view by the average user. It's fodder for Google bots, and there's my problem. They left the title to the blog entry in the text that they copied so it has a link back to my site. Having two crappy sites with some things that Google frowns on (dark text on black background, check!) linking basically every page on their site to mine isn't good for the old Google ranking.
The other little problem I had with this was a matter of traffic and bandwidth. They copied a blog entry of mine that had a wink
in it. I know for a fact that their site had decent traffic last month. My page views stayed pretty steady at around 200,000 last month, but "hits" went from around 390,000 to over 600,000. That made me stop and look. Luckily the extra 300,000 hits were for a tiny little wink gif so it wasn't a major problem. I can fix that hotlinking pretty quickly and easily.So now I'm left wondering what to do about this. I could be mean and redirect those hotlink requests for the gif to a different image, I could return a virus or something nasty, I could make all requests coming from those domains (i.e. if a spider happens to follow that link) go somewhere, or I could just block the requests and move along and eventually they'll find different text for that page. It's late.. I've got bigger things to worry with.
One interesting thing.. because they're leaching an image off of me I get to see all of the IP addresses that visit their site, what page they were looking at, how often, etc.. hmm.. if only I had time to waste I could have some fun.
