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.

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 Spinning Spammers are described as people who are taking posts from real bloggers and then running them through some type of algorithm. This may involve using a thesaurus to find synonyms for the words in questions or an automatic translation program to convert the work into another language and perhaps converting it back to English.

 There is a good explanation of it in this article also on Blog Herald

They then post it on a site, and you get a notice of a track back. If you are good and want to know who is linking to you (and you should), you can go and hand trace the link back to the page it came from. When you get there you will find a post that may kind of look like yours, but at the bottom it has a link that says something like “Go read the rest of the article at:” and it links back to your blog.

So why is this bad? You are getting an incoming link and that is what we all want, right? As the owner of the blog and the post, you did nothing wrong, and there is a good chance that you will see no repercussions from this at all. But there is a small chance that you could get flagged for posting duplicate content or some unkown penalty that Google has yet to come up with.

Besides that, they are stealing the work you have created and that is never good. You took the time to sit down and come up with an idea and write it down. In theory, you also spent time crafting it and changing it until it was just right. All they want is new content to up their AdSense rating and make more money.

How to stop it? Well there are some ways that Jonathan talks about. All of them are good, and I am sure they will work. The one I am trying out is the first one on his list which is the Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress. I have installed it and am running it now, and it looks like it works. You can set your fingerprint to anything you want, and they even give you an option to trace the prints right from your dashboard in WordPress.

 After it has been running a little longer I will give you all an update of how it is working for me. In the mean time what do you all think? Should we be worried about this kind of Spam / Content stealing? Are we wasting time trying to stop them? Let me know in the comments.

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