Like stealing candy from a stuffed bear...
[This is part of the The Blogger’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Series.]
An unfortunate consequence of your blog growing is that you’ll become much more attractive to people who want to steal all your hard work – that is, they see your good w0rk in terms of great blog content and how you’re optimizing your blog for seo and they might also see that your blog’s PageRank is increasing and they’ll want to just come and steal your stuff!
We call these “scrapers” or “content thieves” who can (and will) copy and paste your content into their own blogs. Sometimes they do this manually but many times they do it via software that automates the process, and some of the scraping software out there is really, really good – so good that they can, at the moment of you hitting the publish button, grab your content and publish it to their property in a matter of minutes.
Of course, the consequences are not good – in fact, they could be extremely damaging as search engines might not readily understand or interpret the stolen content as stolen! They could see your copied and stolen content as the authoritative original!
What happens is that they’ll put those copies on top (rank higher) of the SERPs (search engine results pages) instead of you and then you seriously lose out, losing traffic, potential subscribers, and financial opportunities and growth. It’s a sad truth, especially in terms of money since many of these scrapers are making a boatload of cash off of other people’s hard work.
What do you do? Here are two simple strategies for keeping your blog optimized for search and keeping the scrapers in their place:
Nothing is Completely Bulletproof
The first thing to remember is that there is nothing completely bulletproof to stop blog content scrapers from stealing your content unless you’ve made your blog content private and password protected!
But there are a number of ways to “talk” to the search engines that can help them determine who (you!) the original content creator is and give them the rankings and value that they (you!) deserve.
1. Use Absolute Links Instead of Relative Links
The first thing you could do is hard-code some of your links to be absolute links rather than relative links. For example, instead of using this relative link in your blog content…
1 | <a href="../">My Blog's Home Page</a> |
you should do…
1 | <a href="http://tentblogger.com/">My Blog's Home Page</a> |
And this way when someone copies your content they will link back to your blog instead of their own link structure. Another example is when you link to other content in your blog posts:
1 | <a href="/seo/">SEO Series</a> |
is not as good as:
1 | <a href="http://tentblogger.com/seo/">SEO Series</a> |
Got it? Good!
2. Edit Your RSS Feed
One way that many scrapers steal your content is by using your RSS feed to syndicate and re-publish your content. Using a WordPress Plugin that’ll add some links back to your blog in areas they can’t change easily (like your RSS Footer) is one easy way to stop content theft.
In fact, I’ve already created a WordPress Plugin to stop scrapers which you can check out here.
I highly recommend you use this even if you’re not too worried about content theft (at this point anyways).
Finally, if you must, you can of course work through the legal process called a DMCA Takedown. You can read more about it here as well. To be honest I’ve never walked through a full DMCA as it just takes too much time – I’d rather just bolster up my efforts on my end and keep pumping out great content instead!
Good luck!
[This is part of the The Blogger’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Series. Image via Creative Commons, john.]
It’s definitely a shame people will scrape content. I’ve seen it happen to a couple big bloggers recently. Even one had their plugin being sold by someone else even though it’s free! In all instances they were able to shut down the other person.
That’s crazy!
yeah. i know what you’re talking about on that case… sad stuff.
I use Google Reader to keep eye on all my content..this way I can catch them in the act.
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
How do you catch them with google reader?
This doesn’t make sense unless you read and subscribe to every single blog on the Internet.
you’ve obviously tried this. #ROFLCOPTER
Well he seems to comment on every blog on the Internet.
he’s everywhere… not sure what he does though…
… your website link is broken bro. but, you won’t be back to check so i’m sad panda.
What the? How do you catch scrapers by using google reader? It doesn’t make any sense? LOL,
Annie, only someone who is always missing one quotation mark, probably has no idea, and doesn’t read the post before commenting, could use Google Reader to catch the bad guys.
i think he has some canned responses too.
annie,
he’s not sure either.
How do you determine if your content is being scraped?
if you start seeing a lot of pingbacks. that’s a great question.
and google analytics will reveal some.
Thanks for the head’s up! Do I need to be concerned about this if I have a wordpress.com site? I mean, is there anything I can do?
yes but there’s not much you can do on .com.
I am glad WordPress already does this when using the search feature on the add link button in the editor.
Did that make sense?
yup! it does do this.
Yikes!
double yikes!
EXACTLY.
I wrote a post on this before:
http://agilescout.com/duplicate-agile-content-sucks-an-appeal-to-all-agile-bloggers/
winning.
Sadly, my direct supervisor at a job I just left asked me to create a newsletter. I created an original article and when I emailed it to him for review, he told me it was all wrong and that he just wanted me to copy and paste a bloggers work. I told him that if he wants to copy someone else’s work and then link it to an ABC article so it looks credible, then he’ll have to do it alone. And this is suppose to be a thriving business, they’re pathetic!
It’s sad it happens.
yikes! and… how’d he respond to that?
Ethics goes out the window I guess. Good information on how to protect yourself.
sure thing jamie! it’s sad but true. happens all the time.
This happened to me for the first time last week. I was quite surprised. I was also a little excited just because someone thought my content was good enough to actually steal.
Quite a bit of the wording was changed around but the main thoughts were still there.
I started using full URLs to back link my own work quite a while ago so I ended up with several track back entries to my own site from the thieves.
there is somewhat of a …… “wow, thanks…?!”
This is exactly why I only publish poorly written content on my propeties. It is just too risky, you know? J/K
Does adding the canonical tag help prevent Google from being confused in this situation?
Simple and effective tips. Other than searching by an exact section of content, monitoring backlinks, and setting up Google alerts is there another tool or technique to help monitor that you use?
no, canonical doesn’t really play a role in this… insofar as it’s on your site. it might be completely fubar on theirs though…
Yikes, this is making me crazy. Just recently realized that my stuff is getting duplicated all over the place. If I type one of my headlines into Google I get almost TWO FULL pages of direct match content, on random sites, before I even see my link. ugh.
John- where do we do this hard coding? I am linking within my articles correctly, but the first example you gave? Where do I check/fix that? Sorry, by this point in your blog I think I should know the answer…..
Kathy
if you’re using wordpress the internal links should be fine. add the rss footer plugin and you should be good.
At this point I’m not pushing out enough content to be worried about this, if I ever get over 1,000 subscribers then I’ll be all over it
word up!
I added a link to this post today on my blog because I found that my entire posts AND images were being republished online at another site….you can see it here. Thanks for writing about it here. I added some information to my RSS footer.
http://www.northdixiedesigns.com/2012/03/public-service-announcement-is-your.html
sweet!