Fake Blogs Vs Real Blogs
I did a Google search on some of my photography yesterday I found this little cheesecake image is doing well in the creative commons blog world.
Most of the bloggers who used it credited me under the creative commons license which nice to see, but I found two recipe food blogs posting it as if it was the actual cheesecake they had made from their own recipe. Kind of hilarious when you know this delicious little dessert came from a supermarket... haha!!! 😅
So, beware of those food blog/websites, especially the ones that look highly professional, who never credit anyone for the images and have a lack of a personal touch... they’ve probably stolen the recipe or article from somewhere too.
I don’t know what you would call those websites, but I read somewhere about bloggers who are entirely fake, their blog is run for several years, uses loads of images with fairly useless bland articles (in some cases all stolen material) hoping to get a high Google rating so they can later sell the website and it’s domain name once it becomes successful in the Google ratings.
The buyer is often an ill informed fool who will take over the website and turn it in some cases to a completely different website, hoping Google will still rate them highly for articles and images that no longer exist... resulting in continued visitors randomly finding their website.
Some know what they’re doing and manage to make it work, but most fail, and find they’ve spent a lot of money on a useless website.
The blogger selling the website can sometimes make thousands, on the sale of a blog that shows high in the Google listings, but in most cases they too have no idea what they’re doing and the website doesn’t ever get the rating they’re hoping for. If they use stolen articles, Google will know and will eventually give a very low rating to a website posting unoriginal material.
So yeah... some crazy fake people out there who publish a lot of trash just in the hope of making money. It’s not a comfort to know my images are part of that trash now... but I guess it’s inevitable it would happen eventually.... you can’t avoid it.
Some of my images have even been posted on wallpaper sites recently... there’s another fake website idea! Nothing wrong with downloading images you like for your wallpaper on your PC or phone... but don’t ever believe the owners of the images have given permission... most times it’s not the case. It’s just someone trying to make money with advertising on a website using tons of images they grab from anywhere they choose. So be wary of using images from wallpaper websites thinking they are free to use in any way you wish... you’re likely to find they’re not.
When sharing blog post articles to your social media pages, please give a bit of thought to what you are sharing. Best to share those websites that have a more personal touch, where images and sometimes articles are all credited or the images have something familiar about them, that they actually look like they are taken by the same photographer/camera, or where the blogger clearly states all the images are their own. It will probably be a better quality read too, because the purpose of the blog will hopefully be more sincere.
I’m not against sharing images by the way, I do on here myself, but if you can, credit the artist or photographer, it makes it fairer and a lot more interesting too. By crediting the creators of art, photography, even an article, it means others will get to discover more interesting people.
