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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Feed Analysis v1.1 – No CSV File Upload Required

The application takes your FeedBurner feed information and gives you a set of dynamic and easy to understand data.

I find this a much easier way to get the information and to find out what the data is saying to me about the people that are subscribing to my feeds.

This is a free application that works fast. No sign up. All you need to do is to give it your feed information (they hold your hand on what information they need), and they give you a wonderful amount of information.

If you are using RSS on your WordPress blog, and why would you not, then this is a great way to get your FeedBurner information.

If you are not using FeedBurner to track your feeds you should be. Check out this post on how they have a great plugin that makes using them very easy.

What kind of Feed information do you look at, or any at all? Drop me a comment and let me know.

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They talk about the new way that Google will be caculating the amount of people that are subscribed to a feed. This is a good way to know how many people are reading your feed. These are people that do not on a regular bases come to the site but read it through a rss reader of some kind (web based or a desktop piece of software)

They make a great point at the end of the post:

What this all means if you’re a feed publisher is that if you’re interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you’re a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to.

If you are not usung FeedBurner you should. I have added it to this blog and did not have to change a thing in the setings. More so, there is a plug in you can get from FeedBurrner that will take care of most of the heavy lifting form WordPress for you.

I had subscribed to my own feed before I added the plug in ( so should you; this way you can see what your readers are seeing and fix any problems that may come up). After adding the plugin and following the instructions on the page I was woried that I would lose the feed. Not a chance. It just kept on working and all was good. Now I can go to FeedBurner and look at my stats of who is reading the feeds and what type of application they use to read it. All great information

Are you using Feedburner? If you do not then why? Do you know of a different service that you like? Drop me a comment and let me know.

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