How to Benefit When Someone Scrapes Your Content

This Guy be Stealin' Your Stuff!

It happens to everyone.

Content theft.

You work long hours to put out your best work and some scumbag appears and steals it for their own good. This usually occurs as overt theft where someone actually takes your work or product and starts selling it or sharing it as their own; it also occurs quite frequently that some idiot starts scraping your site for their spam blog.

In the first scenario (someone selling your stuff) I recommend getting some legal advice. That’s not what this post is about. I’ve spent plenty of time and money on pursuing infringers of my copyrights and it’s not something I really enjoy.

The second scenario (idiots scraping your blog) is what I’ll be talking about today.

If you have a blog, chances are there are multiple people scraping your content and republishing it as their own (most likely surrounded by ads). They might also strip out the links in your post headlines so you aren’t even getting a link back to your site. This creates confusion for the search engines in determining the original owner of content (despite what they claim, Google appears to be awful at this- or they simply don’t care anymore), and also- it’s theft!

So what do we do about it?

Well, you can call your lawyer. You can file DMCA notices with their hosts. You can complain to Google. Ultimately, the more popular you get, the more people will do this to you. It will get to a point that it will consume all of your time if you pursue all these morons.

There is good news though.

These people, like most criminals, are lazy as hell. They are looking for easy content for their sites and they think the easiest way to do this is to steal your RSS feed and populate their sites with your content. You could get rid of feeds on your site, but for most sites that’s not practical and detrimental as well.

I’ve come up with a better option and all it takes is a free WordPress plugin.

Head over to Yoast.com and take a look at all of his excellent WordPress offerings. We are interested in either his “RSS Footer” plugin or his amazing “WordPress SEO” plugin. The “RSS Footer” plugin is all you need for this example. If you are looking for a superb SEO plugin for your blog though, then WordPress SEO is it. I have it installed on all my WP blogs.

The “RSS Footer” plugin simply allows you to add a link to a place of your choosing in the footer of your RSS feed. This can be a link back to the original post on your blog, a link to a targeted keyword or somewhere else entirely. If you want to see how this looks you can take a look at the RSS feed for this blog here. (why not subscribe while you’re there?)

Make Content Thieves Work for You

Why is this good? Well, when some idiot scrapes your RSS feed they are now going to be advertising for you, and more importantly, providing you with a backlink to anywhere you choose. Remember- thieves are lazy so they are not going to sit there and strip out hundreds of your footer links. They will either opt to not steal your content OR they will do it anyway and you get the benefit of new backlinks. Either way is a win for you.

Is this a perfect solution? No. A perfect solution would be a large dog that flew through time and space attacking content thieves. Until then, this works decently though…and it’s free.