Now we need to talk a little bit about how to prevent blog content scraping. Obviously, we will be focusing on WordPress. Do you want to prevent scammers and spammers from employing content scrapers to take the content from your WordPress blog? As a website owner, it is quite disheartening to watch someone else profiting from your content without your knowledge or consent, ranking higher than you on search engines, and snatching your audience. What might be blog content scraping? How can it be reduced and prevented? Also, how can it be used to your advantage? All these questions and more will be answered in this post.
But first, let’s start with the basics – what is blog content scraping
When the material is gathered from many sources and published on another site, this practice is known as “blog content scraping.” Most of the time, an RSS feed from your blog will do this automatically. Now, all it takes to scrape content from other blogs is to create a WordPress site, choose a free or paid theme, and activate a few plugins. We need to cover the basics. If you wish to read more on this and similar topics check out the Link Department. You will find plenty of useful information. Also, this is a perfect place to keep researching.
“Why are they stealing my content?”
This is a common question. The answer is pretty easy – because your content is great. Actually, these content scrapers are motivated by something other than providing useful information online. A small subset of the possible motivations for content scraping are listed below:
- Affiliate commission – Some affiliate marketers are looking to cheat the system and earn quick cash. Your content, along with those of others, will be used to drive search engine traffic to their site. Promotional merchandise on these sites is typically relevant to the niche they serve.
- Advertising Revenue – There are many who just wish to assemble a central repository of information. A specialized one-stop-shop catering to the needs of its users.
- Lead Generation – Lawyers and real estate agents are notorious for this practice. They are trying to project an image of authority in their respective fields to the general populace. Their resources prevent them from creating original material, so they resort to content aggregation.
Those are just some of the most common reasons why someone is stealing content. They also do it because blog posts are good for backlinks and they don’t want to do it on their own. As you well know writing good content is not easy.
Preventing blog content scraping
It’s easier said than done obviously. But you can do it. It can be time-consuming and laborious to track down content scrapers. There are limited opportunities to identify and punish content scrapers. So, let’s see what you can do on your own :
- You can search Google with your post titles even though it sounds a bit tedious. If you are covering a highly discussed subject, you should probably do something else.
- Ahrefs – SEO tools such as Ahrefs will allow you to keep a watch on your backlinks and detect instances of stolen material.
- Trackbacks – If some site copies your content, you will learn about it through a trackback. That is if you provide some internal links in those copied postings. If a scraper uses this method, it is effectively admitting that is stealing your stuff. The majority of these trackbacks are going to be filtered out as SPAM if you’re using Akismet. Once again, you’ll need internal links within the posts themselves for this to function.
How to deal with blog content scrapers
A few strategies are available for handling content scrapers: doing nothing, taking them down, or making use of them. The “do nothing” strategy is the simplest option. It takes a lot of work combating the scrapers, therefore this is something only the most prominent bloggers would recommend. However, we are aware of a few legitimate websites that have been tagged as scrapers since Google incorrectly identified the content they were scraping as being their own. As a result, we do not think this strategy is optimal in all cases.
A “Take Down Approach” is the opposite of a “Do Nothing” strategy. This method entails getting in touch with the scraper and politely requesting that they remove the content. You can take legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against their hosting provider if they refuse to comply or don’t respond to your demands. As far as we can tell, the vast majority of scraper sites do not provide a functional contact page. If so, take advantage of it! You will need to conduct a Whois Lookup in case they do not provide a contact form on their site.
Can blog content scraping be a good thing?
Indeed, that is possible. Sure, it can be if you’re actually making money off the scraper’s site. If you notice a large volume of visitors coming from a known scraper’s domain, then yes. However, this is rarely the case. Any time possible, you should attempt to have your material removed. As your site grows, though, you may begin to understand that it is next to impossible to monitor every scraper. Although we continue to file DMCA takedown notices, we are well aware that many other websites are also taking our content and we simply cannot monitor them all.
We hope this post has provided you with some useful information on how to safeguard your WordPress blog from being scraped. Additionally, you may like to check out our manual on avoiding WordPress image theft. As you can see blog content scraping can be a bad thing but there are ways to avoid it. If you are having any difficulties you should contact us and we will gladly help you with this or any other problem you might have with your website, blog outreach, or with your SEO strategies. So, don’t hesitate to call.