Art Thievery: help stop it!

So my stuff is being stolen by scraper sites (mine and a lot of other artists who use sites to sell their stuff)

What they do basically is steal my images, descriptions and keywords to make their meta data  weight their site over the actual site where you can buy art. they do not credit me or link back to me or sell the art, they are using it without my permission to get people searching for me or the type of things I paint to land on their page which is an ad farm.

Basically they pay godaddy a dollar or whatever, register a domain, then steal content that google's search algorithm likes, do not link to the actual sites and instead link to a ton of unrelated ads hoping to trick people into clicking on stuff so they make referral money for the ads.

Over the next few weeks I will be linking a lot of legitimate links on my social media sites to my products and my pages in general.

I've already filed DMCA's for the ones I've found so far, which that and trying to reassert valid links, are just about the only things I can do on my end to try and get my search results back.

You can help in two ways.

When You see a link to a product from me take a moment to click through to the hosting page for the product, this will help on the social end and give more weight to the correct link in search results.

When I post links you can re-tweet and share and like them and +1 them, this will again add more weight to the legitimate links.

The main problem is Panda SEO from google required us to pretty much redo everything , so the more optimized you made your content the more panda rewards people who steal your content. Cause these sties are not JUST my stolen stuff, but the stolen art of thousands of artists who have all been scrambling to make sure their listings can get found, they take them and concentrate all that panda bait in one place, and this forces them to the top of the search ranking whenever someone goes looking for art.

so over the next few weeks, any time ANY of your friends or pages you fan post their art links on social media, click like it's going out of style! It will take you two seconds and cost you nothing and support your local artists by helping them reclaim their search results from the thieves.

This is happening to fine art america artists, zazzle artists, redbubble artists, it's all over the forums on those sites. It's also happening to deviant art artists, (although I do not use that site, so I do not know if the forums are abuzz over there, but I imagine they probably are) Pretty much any site where a lot of fine, visual and graphic art is shown off or for sale or PoD.

Front page!

Today and Tomorrow I am the featured artisan on ArtFire The interview will be available archived from now till the end of ArtFire at this link and will be on the front page today and tomorrow. Stop by and check it out!

Contest... win a free tee from redbubble!

Step one... Check out my tees here Pick the one you like most make sure you are following @redbubble on twitter

then, once you have picked out the one you like, click the tweet button

 and add the hashtag  #Tweets4Tees
(like this)

Then share it!


You can enter as many times as you like till January 31st, and they'll be picking one winner a day!


Official Rules are here