Apr 11th, 2008
WORDPRESS TIPS TO THWART SCRAPPERS
Scrappers are everywhere at present and often you will not even be aware of there presence. For those who are uninitiated, a scrapper is someone who copies your content and publishes as their own. These tips may at least help to thwart them.
My first tip, whilst it wont stop them, it certainly provides you with links back to your pages and advertises to the world that the content has been scrapped. The tip, include a least one link within the post to one of your pages. You can also use a second little trick which involves publishing your post, noting its url, then editing the post and including the url somewhere near the end.
Having you post covered with your links may not stop them, it will however provide you with some links. The second step is to actually determine if you are being scrapped. This can be fairly easy. Copy a paragraph of text and paste it into Google’s search engine. If your content is out there Google should find it.
If you have been scrapped, contact the owner and ask them to delete the post. If they don’t, contact the host. At the same time advise Google of content theft. If they are displaying Google ad units they will most likely be suspended.
Scrapping is hard to combat particularly some of the new smart scrappers. They are subscribing and using your RSS feed as a post. This is often only the first paragraph and they are smart. They will link back to your site to ‘read the rest of this article’ but use a written by fictitious name.
If you have been scrapped, and who hasn’t these days, get your feed published through Feedburner. This often gets your new page indexed quickly, faster than a scrapper can get it published. Together with your links in the content the search engines will generally assume yours is the original the scrappers dulplicate content.
You can try to sue but these guys are fly-by-night so it is rather pointless. The are many WordPress tip on how to stop these guys. The bottom line often is to just let them go, milk them for links, and notify Sheriff Google each time.