We've been robbed! Something called SquidWho has hijacked our #1 spot in the Google and Google Images searches for "spongebob." They appear to have redirected the googled link through our post on to their own title page.
"Want to know how to get a zillion hits on your blog?" we wrote four years back, basking in the reflected glory of spongebob, whose notoriety had become an important source of visitors to our blog. As we noted then:
Sure, InstaLinks are — to borrow George Gershwin's felicitous phrase — nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try, but a SpongeBob SquarePants image is forever. We blogged about the "gawky 'square' who wins in the end" — as Tunku Varadarajan aptly describes the pored one today in Opinion Journal — here on New Year's Day last January, and the Google-search hits have been flooding in from all over the world daily ever since.
Since then we've blogged about the crisply rectangular, animated artificial kitchen sponge from time to time as events warrranted, and through the years the linked image of that "zillion hits" post worked its way up to the #1 spot — top left — of Google and Google Images searches for "spongebob," yielding hundreds of extra hits daily for our hungry blog:
Back in May, the image link to our "zillion hits" post had achieved the Number 2 spot in a Google search for "SpongeBob" (above) and the Number 1 spot in a Google Image search. As of the day before yesterday, we had achieved Number 1 in both the regular and image searches. Then came the fall:
We suspected something was wrong yesterday and again today when we noticed a precipitous drop in daily site visits (first and second yellow columns from right, above).
The "Recent Visitors by Referral Search Words" report (above), usually dominated by Google-linked "spongebob" searches, now had only a handful, none of them Google searches but MSN Live searches, where we are still are in the Number 1 spot.
Now when you click on our hijinked link at Google, as the above animated gif illustrates, the link to our post flashes briefly —almost subliminally — before you are taken, kicking and screaming, to the vile thief SquidWho. Check it out here by clicking on the first image (same as at top in this post) on the page. Can anything be done to right this wrong?
Update: How to get a zillion pictures of cute animals: Head on over to Modulator's Friday Ark #205.
There is some code you can add to your blog template to prevent people from hijacking your image files, using the command htaccess.
This page gives a detailed instructions on what needs to be done.
Let me know how it goes. I have a chronic problem with people boosting my images but haven't been motivated enough to put this code in place.
Posted by: quieti | August 21, 2008 at 01:28 AM
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Posted by: Samantha | August 21, 2008 at 05:10 AM
Argh! you got me to checking my own google-opoly on "orange walls" (one I didn't try for, but there it is) and I have been knocked out of my top spot too. I'm halfway down the page. Oh, the ignominy of it all!
Posted by: Patti | August 21, 2008 at 10:20 AM
Typepad may have something in place already to stop hotlinking - I would think it would already be active, but maybe you have to set it up yourself. You may want to check out their help pages or drop their help desk a line.
Posted by: Teresa | August 21, 2008 at 08:34 PM
quieti: Thank you for your suggestion, but that is way too technical for me. Sigh.
Patti: Sorry about your losing the top spot for "orange walls" -- a cool topic I'd never thought of! -- but my image/link hasn't been bumped down the page. I'm not in the running at all. My image is only a means of redirecting the googler to the hijacker's site.
Teresa: Typepad Help recommended I contact Google, which is no easy matter. 'Entered the issue into a Google help group, but when I went back to check for responses, couldn't find my entry. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Thinking about it, 'am not at all sure it's a hotlinking issue, if I'm understanding the term correctly. The hijacker uses Google's link referencing my image -- not the image file itself on my server -- to redirect the googler to HIS site. The searcher bypasses my site altogether. Hmmm.
Posted by: Sissy Willis | August 22, 2008 at 06:01 AM
Sissy, a lower-tech approach might help. Rename the image file on your server, and edit your post to refer to the new file name. The SquidWho link is probably hard-coded to refer to the original file name, and so until they notice you've changed it, theirs won't work. Maybe. This would at least be easy to test!
Posted by: quieti | August 23, 2008 at 03:35 AM
Back again... This article, the last of a series of three, discusses the problem in some detail. There's a link there to a Google form for you to complain about this kind of thing, but I don't know if it's still active. I'd never heard the term "googlewashing" before, but it sounds exactly like what has happened to you.
Posted by: quieti | August 23, 2008 at 04:05 AM