Those nasty Orkut thieves displaying pictures of your children.  Eww, right?

Well, you can limit who can see your blog and who can direct link to it.  You can’t “block” a referring website completely because someone could always go around the referring link and directly type in your blog address… but, get started at least by blocking offending URLs.

To do this, we’ll use an .htaccess file in the ROOT directory of your blog.  This is where the wp-content, wp-admin, and wp-includes folders are found if you are looking via FTP or your cpanel.

Creating an .htaccess file is SIMPLE and effective.  There are two types of blocks you can make!

If you know a particular creeps IP address, you can block that IP address with this code:

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

The 123.45.6.7 is the offender’s IP address! List them out, one by one.  Add to your file regularly if you find IPs that you don’t like (by checking your statcounter or analytics for example, or seeing an IP address from a nasty comment left!

This only deny’s a single IP (or set of IPs)… let’s deny a REFERRING URL… like Orkut!

Orkut’s BASE url is www.orkut.com

Block this by adding to your file this code:

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} badsite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Simply change badsite to orkut.  Done!

Now, what to do with these codes???

Step 1:  Create a NEW text document using your favorite text editing program (I use notepad on Windows!)

Step 2:  Save the file as htaccess.txt

Step 3:  Paste the piece of code you prefer (or use both) into the file.  It will look like this below, only you will have changed the IP addresses or referring sites to match what you want to block!

Step 4:  Save and close the file

Step 5:  Find the file on your computer and RENAME the file to .htaccess (remove the .txt and add a . to the front)… this must be EXACT!

Step 6:  Use your favorite FTP client to move the file to the root directory of your blog!

Step 7:  Ha!  Tricked ya!  There is no step 7!

Using htaccess will give the person trying to access your blog a 403 Forbidden error when they try to access your pages.  It will ALSO keep people from being able to “hot link” files from your site (link to your images for example).

Hey, leave a comment, we’d love to help answer questions about this in future posts!  Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed or our newsletter!

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