Scraping and me!

I first want to say to my readers that only read Findability Today through RSS feeds, that I am sorry. The reason for me saying this is that I have had to add a header to my feeds that say I wrote the post for Findability Today. The reason I did this is that I am finding more and more of my posts being scraped from the rss and posted on blogs that are then claiming that they created the content.

For those of you that do not know what Scraping is, it is when someone subscribes to your RSS feed and syndicates that feed on their blog and then takes credit (or not give the creator credit). This is not only just bad karma, but it is also theft. I spent the time to create this content and post a feed of it for you all the readers to freely read and (hopefully) learn from. I did not do all of this research and writing so someone can take it and steal it just to put content on their blog to drive traffic so they can make money off of the adds.

Now to be fair I do read sites that scrape feeds, but they give the creator of the content full credit. I have no problem with this, and I would have no problem with someone doing that with my feeds. I should also say that not all scraper sites are looking to make money off of ads, some are hoping for a higher Google Page rank.

What can a creator of content on a WordPress blog do to stop people from stealing their content? Not much really. One of the things that I use is a plugin that allows me to add a footer (or as I have set it up now a header) to your RSS feed saying that I created the content. What this will hopefully do is when the feed is scraped and posted to the scrapers blog is instead of the first line talking about the subject it will say something like “This content was created by Topher for FindabilityToday.com only.”.

My personal hope is that this will do one of two things. First, it will let the people that read this on a site other than mine to know who really wrote the content, and that it was not created for the site they are reading it on. Second I have a wild dream that by doing this it will discourage people from posting the scraped feeds on the blog because it does not look good on their blogs. I am not holding my breath that the last one will work at all.

I have been asked “What harm is all this if when people click on the ‘read more’ link they come to your site?”. For me it is an image thing, one of the blogs that is stealing my feed labels itself a black hat SEO site(if you do not know black hat SEO uses techniques that can some times be classified as slimy and google looks down on and penalizes you for using them). That is something I do not want to be part of, and I do not want it to look like I condone or practice the things that are associated with Black Hat SEO. I am willing to give up some traffic to make sure that the content I write is used correctly and not giving me or the blog a bad name.

So what do you all think? Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill? Have you had to deal with this? Is there a better way to stop it, or least slow it down? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Thanks for reading.