BY Chinenye Okoye
Linda Ikeji’s blog, www.lindaikeji.blogspot.com, has been shut down by Google.
Following a petition on plagiarism laid against the celebrity blogger, Google blocked the site after carrying out an investigation into the allegations.
On Tuesday, Ikeji had alleged that one Emmanuel Effremov, an IT expert, was masterminding a hate campaign to run her out of business.
“The only reason this is happening to me is because I’m number one…so I am flattered,” she had written.
“I am currently No.10 on alexa.com, more read than all the other news sites in Nigeria, so I understand why I am the target. If I were them, I’d hate me too.”
Effremov, the man behind the probe into the content of LIB ( as the blog was fondly known) was traced to the Twitter handle, @MrAyeDee, with Linda saying he had been stalking her site for years.
“Effremov is a Manhattan-based IT expert who owns 15past8.com media group and has about 100 registered websites of different domain names, including eight with the name, lindaikeji,” Ikeji said.
In defending the allegation against her, she had insisted that she usually credited the sources of her content, except for cases where the actual source could not be determined.
She admitted taking content from other sites but claimed she was not alone in the act.
“Which website in the world doesn’t?” she asked, before saying foreign sites like Bossip.com, Daily Mail Uk, Uk Mirror, E! Online and CNN are equally involved.
She believes strongly that her success, especially her recent acquisition of a N24 million SUV, which she proudly showed off on her blog, is the reason for her predicament.
“Immediately after I shared photos of my new SUV, these guys reconnected and decided it was finally time to end LIB because there were quite a few people who were mad that I bought the car and they wanted to play on their emotions,” she wrote.
She has also tried to calm her readers down with a tweet stating that her blog would back on soon.
Before the shutting down, LIB ranked as the tenth most visited Nigerian site on alexa.com.
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