Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

... another site that comes along and steals our content.

Good morning everyone ... I sure hope you're all fit and well on this bright and sunny Monday morning. Actually I'm writing this on Sunday morning my time because I'll be away in Brisbane tomorrow but I'm in an optimistic mood so I'm sure it will be a beautiful morning wherever you happen to be when Monday morning rolls around.

So let's take a look at yet another nasty site that wants to come along and steal our content and somehow monetize it as its own. The site is tynt.com ... and they also use tynted.net ... and the people behind those two sites claim to be extending the ability of surfers to have a conversation to every site on the Net. Sadly it doesn't seem to have dawned on them that not every webmaster wants people to talk about his or her site ... on the site ... but as far as the guys behind Tynt are concerned that seems to be neither here nor there.

Instead of thinking about what webmasters may or may not want the crew behind tynt.com have gone ahead and launched their sites and they give members the opportunity to enter a URL into a search bar on Tynt's site and then see it appear in a kind of frame. I say 'a kind of frame' because normal frame-busting techniques don't seem to work on Tynt ... I know because I've tried that option.

Once the site is loaded inside Tynt's frame members can then write comments about the site and these comments appear as sticky notes blobbed all over the site in such a way as to obscure the content. But obscuring the content is not the only problem we webmasters face here.

Many very serious sites are defaced ... if you look at them in Tynt ... with totally irrelevant and just plain stupid comments. Think of it as the worst graffiti you have ever seen and you're getting close to the idiotic comments that are daubed all over many sites thanks to Tynt.

But even that isn't the major problem for many innocent webmasters. Oh no ... it gets much worse than that. If you've got a mainstream site and Tynt grabs you and loads you in its frame any Adsense advertising that you may have had on the site loses its relevance to the content of the site. The best example I've seen so far was for a genuine family site that got tynted and their Adsense advertising began to display an ad for a Gay Bear dating site.

It seems that once Tynt.com lays its frame over a site the Google Adsense bot can no longer follow the relevance of the content and it becomes totally confused. And what was Tynt's response to that one?

It went something like ‘Oh we're looking at it but we don't want to rush into things ... we want to take a measured response to this problem'. A measured response? Rush into things? Hey Tynt you're destroying the reputation and income of sites here and you don't want to rush into things?

But wait, there's more. Once Tynt gets hold of your site you can almost guarantee that it's going to outrank you for all those search terms that are important for you. Hell Tynt even outranks Google for some search engine terms!

So what can you do to keep this parasite out of your sites? Well they claim to have let everyone know what their web crawler is called so that you can block it via an entry in your robots.txt file ... but if they have then I never saw the memo and in their response to everyone's complaints they conveniently omit to mention the name of their crawler.

You can block their domain names - both tynt.com and tynted.net - in your htaccess file. That results in anyone trying to access your sites through Tynt.com getting a 403 error but I'm told that doesn't keep their crawler out of your site. So the best way to block them seems to be by denying their IP range in your htaccess file.

If that's what you choose to do then I'm told that they're currently using two IP ranges and you should block all IPs in the 204.244.109.240 - 204.244.109.247 range and the 204.244.120.176 - 204.244.120.183 range. Those ranges may change in the future by right now they're the ones that Tynt Multimedia Inc is using to crawl the web.

And now that I've blocked those content thieves from my sites I'm off to enjoy the rest of a beautiful Sunday.