Is Someone Stealing Your Content? Try This…

March 4, 2009 · Filed Under SEO Advice, SEO Tips, Wordpress, blackhat seo 

Content stealing or scraping has always been a problem online.  And as the search engines get more aggressive in weeding out sites that offer relatively little content, the problem of content theft will only continue to grow.

While you can’t prevent this all together, there are some steps that you can take, especially when it comes to your blogs in order to make it more difficult for these scrapers to take your content, or at least if they do, be sure you’re getting a link back to your site.

One of the ways is to add one of a number of free plugins to your blog.  One of these is the feed footer plugin.

This plugin adds an RSS footer to each blog post you make which contains not only a link back to this blog but which also links to the Bonehead SEO product itself.  Whenever an automated scraper makes a visit, and copies any of the content on this blog (or on any other blog that uses this plugin), the footer will automatically be included.  Now this doesn’t mean that the person stealing the content will not remove this information in order to post the content on their site, but it does add an extra step to the mix.

Another one of these plugins is one called Ozh’ Better Feed. This plugin also allows you to add a footer to your RSS feeds.  The copyright plugin also adds information to your feeds but allows for a lot more options.

Lastly, there’s the AntiLeech plugin.  This one is very unique to say the least. This plugin creates fake content for the scraper but still includes links back to your site.  When your content is stolen, it provides the thief with useless content.

So if you were ever concerned that your content was being out and out stolen on your site, or you have a fear that it might come to that in the future, just install a few of these plugins to get your protection started.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Is Someone Stealing Your Content? Try This…”

  1. Jonathan Bailey on March 10th, 2009 8:25 pm

    In a moment of irony, I found this post via a spam blog that had scraped it. So, obviously, the footer did have some impact in this case.

    While agree that these tools can greatly mitigate the impact of content theft, it is still important to track and, in some cases, stop it. After all, Google is far from perfect and, even with all the right clues, it doesn’t always figure out who the original is.

    So yes, thank you for shining the light on these techniques, but definitely keep in mind that, sometimes, the only way to deal with content theft is to actually stop it.

  2. Kristine on March 11th, 2009 6:45 am

    That is ironic.

    But it did lead you here :-)

    I completely agree that it’s an uphill battle with people stealing your content but thankfully we can put some measures in place to help curb that from happening.