There’s a lot of blogs and unfortunately, there’s also a lot of scrapers and copy and paste thieves who try to make a living off the works of others. I’ve read a lot of articles on the topic, and here’s some of the best ways to prevent it, and take action if it happens.

Scrapers are people who use an automatic script to read your RSS feed and publish it on their blog, usually a blogger or other free place. Then they put Adsense ads on it to try making money from the unique content. The first line of defense is not to use a full RSS feed (where the whole article is available that way). Limit it to 3-5 lines, and a summary will be available so people can click through to read the whole thing. Getting them to visit your site is the goal anyway, it’s very hard to monetize an RSS feed.

Scrapers can then just steal a snippet, and you avoid  the Google duplicate content penalty. You can always report their blog to the hosting company, but it’s a lot better if you report them to whatever advertising they’re doing. It’s much more likely Google will shut down an Adsense account and ban them than the chance of getting their free hosted blog shut down. Also if someone gets banned from Google, it’s almost impossible to get it restored. One person I heard got banned, and his wife couldn’t even get an account because her credit card on file at the same address.

Copyscape is nice for checking on copied pages, but it’s a lot easier to just copy and paste a few unique sentences of an article you wrote into Google to find the copy and paste thieves. Copyscape charges a hefty fee, and they just use Google anyway, do it yourself and save some money. Again, I’d follow the money trail and report them, a free web hosting service probably won’t do anything unless you mail them a cease and desist letter by registered mail. When they receive that, if they don’t do anything they’re no longer protected by the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA and you can then sue them.

Deep and shallow linking is important. You might notice in a lot of blogs you’ll find links to existing stories or even to the blog home page. Most scrapers who run automated scripts will steal the links and all from your RSS feed. If you have it set to just display the first five lines of a story, it’s important to have a deep link (one going to a page within your blog) or shallow link (one direct to your home page) inside that first five lines (or whatever you limit the RSS feed to). At least this way you can get a free link back, but mix up the link and anchor text or Google might think you’re link spamming.

One handy tool is a little plugin called RSS Footer which lets you put a link to your site before the RSS feed rather than after. This makes the scraper site give you a backlink whenever they display your stuff. There’s also huge article on this with 100 tips on content theft here. Overall though, I’d limit the time you spend pursuing these thieves. If you can spend the time instead writing new posts, it’ll be of much more benefit. Probably the most important thing is to use a plugin like Twitoaster to automatically tweet your posts so they get into Google before any scraper site does.    As always, if you have any tips of your own please feel free to chime in with a comment.

Nick