You work hard on your content, and it’s really disheartening to see that someone else has stolen it and published it on their site. But, what can you do about it?
These lazy bloggers who steal content from other sites are called scrapers, and they most commonly get your content through your RSS feed and put it on SPAM blogs (called ‘splogs’), usually in the hopes of earning income through AdSense installed on the splog.
So, what should you do? Can you stop them?
Most ‘splogs’ don’t have contact information on them, so contacting the owner of the splog is usually an effort in futility. (However, if you catch your content on a site that does have contact information available, by all means – contact the blog owner and tell them to take your content down!)
Should you stop publishing a feed? No, that hurts your readers and subscribers who rely on your feed to bring them the information you publish. So, what then?
Use the FeedEntryHeader plugin to add a copyright notice at the top of your feed, along with a statement of where to find the original publisher of the content.
I just installed this plugin over the weekend, and here’s what my feed now looks like:
Now, if any of my posts get picked up by one of these scrapers, at least this notice will go along with it, and it will be much more apparent to anyone reading that post that the content came from somewhere else.
Install and activate the FeedEntryHeader plugin on your blog and know that you’re doing your part to “out” the content scrapers of the world.
