Content Scraping: Is Someone Ripping Your Content AND Good Name? – Part 2
Image via
In Part 1 of the series we talked about content scrapers & how they work, in this article we will take a deeper look on how to detect & take action against those leechers.
This is why Copyscape – the plagiarism checker was created. Copyscape is a sophisticated search engine that can often “see through” attempts at disguising or stuffing content with keywords. Remember, content scrapers are spamming search engines so most won’t bother trying to disguise scraped content. They’ll just post it. But since Google has cracked down on these cyber-thieves, some content scrapers will change a headline or subhead and maybe even add a few lines of text to your post.
Copyscape can often find what Google can’t. And the service is free. Just type in your site’s URL to see who’s ripped your content. If you’re lucky, you’ll come up clean when you run a Copyscape search. If not, you may find your content has been ripped by a couple of dozen sites.
If you are a Wordpress user, Antileech plugin works like a charm for most of the bloggers. Basically scrapers wont noticed anything odd when they steal your content, except that the plugin has generated some random content to let them put up on their sites. So how do Antileech identifies a spammer?
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.
Now that you get the idea of how it works, simply download it & upload just like any plugin. It won’t take more than 5 minutes to save you from duplicate content issues & like any other plugin, it’s FREE.
Will backlinks from these sites affect my rankings?
It’s almost impossible to affect a website. Imagine this: If this is so easy to affect the SERP of a website, these thieves will most likely sabotaging their competition all day long. It might work if they want to take down a newly created site, but an A-list blogger probably wont feel itchy at all. Of course, the best way to prevent this is to gain high quality inbound links from relevant authority websites. With these link love from another bloggers, search engine will know you are a good citizen & they wont put you back behind the steel bars
Try to ask a thief to return the thing they have stolen & they will ignore your request, same theory applies to blogging. You ask them to remove the content & they wont give a sh*t. Worried? Relax, Google will know who’s the original writer & they will identify who’s the copycat. But think of it, these sites might have some PR & you can get some link juice from them, so why not just enjoy these freebies?
Content scraping doesn’t mean anything bad, when someone tries to steal something from you, that means you must have something valuable for them to steal, & that’s a good signal that you are on your way to become a better blogger :p
Good post but I don’t understand your statement “But think of it, these sites might have some PR & you can get some link juice from them, so why not just enjoy these freebies?”.
Can you please explain how stolen content leads to inbound links?.
Thanks,
Tim
: Most of the content scraping sites will feature a link which says “This post is written by *author’s name* link below the post because they are trying to make it look like a post written by a real person. Authors will probably get credits via these inbound links.
keep posting edward.
thanks for that info
I know there are auto blogging software which use the same concept. You just need to specify the RSS feed and automatically the software will scrape the content off the specified site.
Of course, they will still scrape the original source of the article, these obviously will mean additional free backlinks to your site.
Wrong , content scrappers uses bots , and they change Authors , links etc. automatically , you have no luck for backlink such as:
I have stopped my wordpress site because tthere is no was to stop scrappers , such as here is the scrapper:
http://www.pcpcforum.com/Forum-pc-hakkinda-genel-bilgi-ve-ipucu
all content are scrapped from web , Plugins have no luck to stop scrappers