Have you ever been surfing the internet only to come across a blog that has an article, or a couple of articles, that are the exact same as yours?
This is calling content scraping, and believe it or not, it happens all the time.
I like to compare content scraping to a potluck dinner. They all attract people who have no intention of bringing a damn thing, only to sit and eat all the chicken and potato salad they can get their grubby little hands on before someone notices.
Content scrapers sit and grab up all the good articles they can find on the web and repost them on their own blog or website, to gain traffic, and only hope that those they stole from won’t catch them.
How To Tell If Your Being Scraped
If you’re using wordpress and you’ve deeplinked your posts, then you wordpress control panel will list the blogs that are scraping your content.
If you don’t deeplink your posts, the best method of finding out if someone has scraped your content is to do a google blog search. Copy and paste a portion of your post into the search box and hit enter. If your content is out there on another blog besides yours, then you’ll know.
There aren’t a lot of methods for finding if your content’s been scraped, so if you can’t find it on a search engine, chances are you probably don’t need to worry about it, because no one else can find them either.
Does Content Scraping Hurt My Blog
Sometimes it can. If someone is scraping your images it can hurt your bandwidth if they still use your links, instead of saving and reposting the images themselves. Your bandwidth is the lifeblood of the internet. It’s alot like your cell phone minutes. If you run out, you’ll be paying alot of money in overdraft fees.
Most scrapers aren’t re-posting just images though. The majority are ripping your content and reposting it using automated means, or manually. If the website or blog scraping your content is blacklisted in the search engines, it could possibly hurt you.
Scraping can also hurt your search engine rankings by possibly bumping you out of the top spots and putting those spammers in your place. It can also cause confusion among your readers (they may think your scraping the content).
What Can I Do About It
There are alot of different options to deal with content scrapers, if you’re willing to put some time and effort into dealing with them.
- Place a copyright notice and a link back to your blog at the bottom of each new post in your rss feed. If you use feedburner for your feeds, they have an option called feedflare that allows you to do it. There are also many great plugins for wordpress that allow you to add content to the footer of your rss feeds. My recent post listing the plugins I use has one that I really like. By adding this to the bottom of your feeds you are showing anyone who visits the scrapers site that they stole your content, and also providing a linkback to help you track who is doing it.
- You could also comment on the scrapers blog letting everyone know that they stole your content. Of course, this could easily be deleted, so it’s not your best option.
- You could hire a lawyer, but most prefer not to because the cost of of the lawyer could far outweigh the benefits of shutting down the content scraper. If you’re a top blogger and having your content scraped could hurt your financially, then hiring a lawyer might be your answer, no matter the cost.
- Contact the scraper and ask them to remove your content. If the website scraping your content doesn’t have ads displayed all over their site, then there could be a chance that they don’t know what they are doing is actually wrong.
- Report the scraper to search services such as Google, and Technorati, as spam to get their website or blog removed from the search engines all together.
The best thing to remember is content scraping happens to even the most protected and best bloggers. Always keep your cool, and handle it in a professional manner. Most of the time, the problem will work itself out.
Have you ever had your content scraped?
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My name is Steven Sanders and I'm a Professional Blogger, Izea Insider, Web Designer, Social Media Enthusiast, Dad, Husband, and Friend.
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work
Well, for starters, I’m getting to know about content scrapping for the first time here and now on this site!
Next is that I think it’s immoral.
I think people should have the decency to acknowledge their sources and place links back to them. But then this is the tragedy of the real world. It emphasizes the need to stay on top of your game, be careful and take all of the necessary precautions.
So, Steve, how does one ‘deeplink’? or what do you mean by deeplinking?
You have your work cut out for you man! So keep informing us of all these tech tips…thanks
Excellent work, Steven.
I didn’t think this would happen too much, but now I know that’s a pretty naive take on things.
Thanks for the eye opener
George
Tumblemooses last blog post..Top 10 Top 10 lists for writers
Haven’t been scraped yet, I’ll take that as a sign of success I guess…kind of like getting your first hater in the comments.
Matt
Matt | Small Business Entrepreneurs last blog post..Good Business in Bad Times
Great tip Steven. We work too hard with our blog to have someone just walk in and take what they want, I also would like to know more about deeplink, sounds like a new post!
BloggerNewbies last blog post..RED alert!
Deep linking is simply linking to a post within your blog from another post within your blog.
I had always thought that people only stole post from ‘the big boys (and girls)’ but, I am a nobody and had mine taken.
Funny thing is I would have never known it until a person left a nasty comment on my blog, stating that I had not given their friend credit. They were kind enough to leave me a link to the ‘original’.
All I can say is the mail started going out.
The idiot that stole my post, word for word, even submitted it to an article site with his name on it.
I do know that like many people I read allot of blogs and forums and get ideas so, there is a chance that more than 1 blogger will have similar ideas but, you can usually see the difference.
I also think that to many people feel that because many software programs find articles for you and automatically post them that they to can just take anything they want.
Ok, just my 10 cents,
Sheryl Loch
Sheryl Lochs last blog post..Update Social Networking Profile with Your RSS Feed
This has to be one of the best post I have read on your blog. You have valuable information, but this is priceless. Copyright infringement is against the law and simple not fair to the author.
Lauras last blog post..Welcome to FeedBurner
@Laura: Thanks alot for the compliment. I love it when everyone gives me this kind of feedback.
Steve,
You keep giving great posts…I’m gathering a huge list of things I have do do now to update my blog! I’m taking BloggerNewbie’s (http://bloggernewbie.com/blog/) advise about lists:) Thans man! Keep up the good work!
Webdesi3s last blog post..A Rough Guide to Blogging
Hi Steve, thanks so much for the help, yes that has happened to me, in fact it’s happening to me right now this website bytcs.com is copying my family’s blog, and other entertainment blogs, and it’s making me furious, I’ve contacted all of his ad sponsors including Google, and his webhosts, and I’m thinking of going to the police or a lawyer soon, but I swear, I’m having a heart attack it’s stressing me out so much and I don’t know what to do.