Web scraping and copying is a technique by which an automated tool copies your blog/forum article and pastes it on thieve's site.
If you write a blog/forum, then you must be well aware of the fact that there are people around who just copy and paste your content on their website and you are not able to do anything about it. Copying somebody else's original work is an illegal activity but it is really difficult to track these thieves and force them to take down your original content.
In a bid to devalue duplicate websites, Google recently introduced some changes in their web page rating algorithm which helps find websites/blogs which have huge amount of copy pasted content from other sources. The aim of the change was to put original content websites on top of Google search results. But is there anything that you can do to tackle this issue? The answer is yes..i will explain how to ditch copycats later in this article.
How do copy scrapers copy content?
There are two major ways of copying:
- Human Copy and paste: Is a time taking and hectic process. Difficult to repeat everyday for any thief.
- Automated Copy and paste using web Scrapers: This is easier and widespread way of copying blog articles. Normally, a copy scraper will subscribe to your RSS feed and program its tool to read data as and when you publish it in your feed and simply paste it on his own blog. Simple! You spend hours to write articles and he copies it in seconds!
What's is the resolution?
It is a very common issue these days and look like there is no easy that you can stop anybody from copying your content. But there is a way in which you can actually ditch copier and get yourself something out of nothing. If you simply add a footer saying that
"This article was originally published at ", then you have at least gained a link back to your own website. Here is a snapshot of one of the article feed from our blog:
Benefits and points to remember while adding "Original" footer
- It is not sure if Google or any other search engine can identify that a particular blog entry is copied on the basis of this 'original' article footer or not but it certainly helps readers/users find out the original source. May be Google's algorithm is also tracking these kind of text to find copied content.
- If the copier is simply using an automated tool to copy your RSS feeds, you will get a link back to your article automatically. More links means better Google ranking. So, you are building your links without any extra effort.
- The original article text and link should NOT be visible on your blog article as it will signal that you have also copied the content. So, make sure that you add it only to your RSS/Atom feeds.
I personally use this method to ditch copiers and i hope you would also like to ditch your copycats!