How to Remove Clones of your Google Gadget from the Directory

Google has taken some steps that help you keep you claim your Google gadgets and allow you to remove gadgets that are claiming to be you or your brand, but are not.

This happened often, and made the google gadget directory look strange as shown in the screen shot.
There were over 100 “clones” of my gadgets in the directory alone. This is where someone has copy and pasted your code in it’s entirety and then submitted to the Google gadget directory.

When several people do this it causes many repetitive (spam) gadgets to be returned when someone is searching for a gadget in the directory.

How to remove clones of your Google gadget

iGoogle has a feature called Google gadget dashboard where you can claim your gadgets. This feature allows you to claim any gadget that is associated with emails that are yours. Once you claim all the gadgets associated with your email, you will have the ability to remove gadgets from the Google gadget directory. If there are clones of your gadget (someone pretending to be you) then you can now remove them.

1. To access your dashboard and claim your gadgets go here.

2. Follow the steps (this is basically an email verification process).

3. Claim one of your gadgets. When you do this, it will actually show you all the other gadgets associated with that email address and ask you if you want to claim those too. Claim them all.

Now you have a dashboard and all of it’s neat tools like stats of users worldwide and page views and graphs and such…

5. Now that your dashboard is set up, you will notice that some of the gadgets listed are clones. This can be seen rather easily as shown by this screenshot of part of my dash board….

I remember making that gadget once, but here are like ten different versions of it! These are clones, but now they are my clones and I have the power to remove them!

6. For each gadget clone go to right hand side and click “remove from directory” link.

7. You will now be prompted to go through another email verification process.

8. Once you verify, you will receive a message in your dashboard stating that the gadget will be removed from the directory within 48 hours.

This is a bit of a process, but understandable.

After you are through, you have just made the Google gadget directory a little bit less of a spam cess pool, and your name and email are not associated with spam gadgets anymore.