Monday, January 03, 2011

Plagiarism is fun

I was browsing around and decided to go take a look at my own blog as if I were some anon, just to get an idea of how accessible my blog was through Google and Bing.
I was surprised to see that my blog, which for more than a year, had no problem to hit the top of the page, got double taken by two odd websites which decided to call themselves respectively stonebytes.com and stonebyte.com.

The first one, rather uninspired, is the work of someone who literally took the entire name of my blog, s included, and moved forth. Its author pretends to be a professional web designer, with no less then 12 effin' years of experience!
Yeah... err WUT?
Surely, the main page speaks for itself *cough*:



I designed mine, my very first attempt at any form of design whatsoever, in a few weeks, from the former idea to the small incremental tweaks. When I mean a few weeks, the overall style and design was already completed within a week on my spare time.

As for the links on our little thief's website, either they're not working or lead to some unique page that contains the same light content :



Impressive.
Did you see that? There's a link to a blog. Uh-huh. I wonder what it will look like. :)
When it comes to the experience itself, you're left to be judge of just one single website, StratFu, some unremarkable and obscure community website. Hell, the link doesn't even work here either ! How sad. But wait, this is not all. Do you want to see something truly pathetic ?
The so called web designer of StartFu claims the following records for said website:


  • 1 million hits/month
  • Drupal-based with 15,000 lines of custom code
  • Community-sourced content


I don't know about the last two ones, but I'm sure that a website which can guarantee a 1 million hit per month would have a forum a little bit more active than... that.
Not to say that there's quite a huge difference between a true new visit and a mere hit, which is any access to a file on the website. Any sound businessman knows the difference, especially when one tries to sell a given website and tries to establish a potential trend regarding ROI.
There's actually a good many ways to boost the hit per month ratio. For any publisher, this value is actually totally meaningless.
Of course, for anyone having a clue about what realistic web traffic numbers should look like, even a monster of a hub could only claim a couple hundred of thousand visits a month, unless you were the most popular  super main website in China, that is. ;)
A website that claims a hundred thousand unique visits could claim a million hits. But we're certainly not dealing with a website that can claim a hundred thousand unique visits.
The available Google cache dates this website by 29 Nov 2010 01:26:47 GMT. Seriously, what a crook.

The name of my blog was just that awesome, I guess.


Now the second "website" is even worse.
It's not even a website, but a mere index without even the most basic protective file that would have made sure the browsing of the tree would remain private! : /

What I find truly incredible is how those two ripoffs have managed to get noticed!
The first website comes just second to me on Google, which in itself is already baffling, but first on Bing (???). Bing is so broken that it even puts my blog behind a company's website that sells an anti-adware tool and talks about some malware hidden in a Sharon Stone screen saver. *sigh*
Bing doesn't even list to my main page, but an article of mine. This silly search engine actually manages to list my blog's main page after the repository stonebyte.com.

Did I forgot to blow someone or what?
 Luckily, I never planned to buy a domain name for my blog, it's totally fine as it is, free and all that. ^_^

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