When Your Blog is Getting Scraped
It’s upsetting to discover that nefarious individuals have scraped your RSS feed to make money off your hard work.
Many bloggers are also concerned that it will affect their rankings in the search engines. However, according to Google, they are quite good at identifying original content, and the result is no negative effects for the originating site.
According to Google:
Generally, we can differentiate between two major scenarios for issues related to duplicate content:
- Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site
- Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites
Search engines identify duplicate results and will then filter out all but one. They try to figure out which is the original by checking which version was published first and which has the most links pointing to it. They also look at which site is the more authoritative one.
Usually, duplicate content will not affect your site negatively, but instead will get filtered out.
All that said, it’s still infuriating to find your own content on a scraped blog. There’s at least one blog that has been scraping the Diva for some time now. Contacting site owners that scrape usually does no good. One plugin that’s helpful is WP-Ban. You can block the IP address of the scraping site.
One thing I’ve been considering is putting an absolute link within or at the end of my posts, so I at least have a link to the originating site (mine), like this:
Hi !
we do send out DMCAs on a regular basis to scrapers who steal our content.
This is effective if you address
- the hosting company (so their WHOLE server with 100s of sites) gets shutdown
- the registrar (so their domain get’s turned off = their site disappears from Google)
- to Google Adsense (so they cannot make anymore money of OUR or anyone elses content)
- to Google itself (for SERPs or Blogger accounts to get closed)
The downside is, that DMCA creation is a PITA, and I couldn’t handle it without my assistants doing the job here, so you need a considerable workforce to protect your content online.
best,christoph
Christoph C. Cempers last blog post..Yahoo Site Explorer format changed – let’s fix your scrapers and tools !
@Christoph – thanks for the info and suggestions. The process may be a PITA, but I think it would be worth it…getting ripped off like that is maddening.
The problem is that usually a bigger and more authoritative site will be looked at as being the original and this has created a very bad breed of scrapers. Bigger sites with PR4 and PR5 that look for fresh new articles from small sites, scrape them and since they are bigger and more likely to be the original authors in google’s eyes to poor little guy who actually worked gets nothing at best and a penalty at worst.
If you’re getting scrapped someone really likes your content. But it can be highly annoying! I used to have this problem all the time.
One day I made a completely unrelated change to my blog that changed this dynamic. I added a plugin to add related posts to the actual feed.
Almost immediately the scrapping stopped almost completely. I guess scrapers don’t like giving linkbacks!
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FYI – I attempted to comment yesterday and your site went down big time…now I forgot what my comment was lol.
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Link at the end is not so bad idea actually.
In addition to my blog, I help maintain a couple others that have been scraped before – is there a way for search engines to know which content is actually the original content? Post date could be one way to tell, but even that won’t always reveal the original content.
Brady – Mac Got Mes last blog post..Must Have Mac Apps – The Must Have Mac Software Roundup
WP-Ban is useful, but it’s better just to find out where does your article go and let Google know, and they will not be able to use Adsense anymore, just like Christoph said.
I’ll check out WP-Ban, but how do you let Google know? Is there a URL where you can report content thieves?
Brady – Mac Got Mes last blog post..Must Have Mac Apps – The Must Have Mac Software Roundup
Here’s the link to the Google DCMA page on copyright infringement, with links to the various services where you can report violators: http://www.google.com/dmca.html.
Nice article to bring up. How do you even know if you are being scraped?
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@Eric, if you’re using WP, it will show you what’s linking to your site, and sometimes they’ll show up that way. You can also do a Google search for your titles…scrapers don’t change them.
Finally a voice of reason! I have this annoying guy scrapping my content. I feel like I am about to loose my mind. Worse off he is selling crap insurance which has nothing to do with what I am about.
I am glad I came here, I am going to install that plugin and ban the sucker. I copy righted my RSS feed too! Death to scrappers!
I don’t suppose you have any 411 on the double indent. I find I able to acheive, but honestly it has been largely due to chance and I would like to learn the science of it all
Thank you!
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WP-Ban is useful, but it’s better just to find out where does your article go and let Google know, and they will not be able to use Adsense anymore, just like Christoph said.
Apart from that, If you are getting scrapped someone really likes your content. But it can be highly annoying! I used to have this problem all the time.
Is there a URL where you can report content thieves?
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I have heard that there is a thing known as Google DMCA for filing the case against the person who copies ur content.. Thats too annoying.
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@Brett – yes, there is. So far it takes more time than I want to spend, but if the scraping gets really bad I’ll take action. Having a copyright at the bottom of feeds helps. At least you get your link that way.