Content Scraping: Is Someone Ripping Your Content AND Good Name? – Part 2

Stop Stealing

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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 :wink:

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

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