How to Protect Your Blog from Scrapers

Blog scraping is a problem many bloggers face today. Automated software scans and copies thousands of blogs a day and passes off the content as someone else’s except for yours.

Preventing scrapers not only protects you from being penalized by Google for finding duplicate content, but also helps protect your reputation as a writer/blogger. The last thing you want is to find an article you spent hours on to appear on 5 different websites as published by someone else.

If you run a WordPress blog, it’s crucial that you take the time to download this little plugin called RSS Signature. Most scraping software targets your RSS feed when it steals your content. What RSS Signature does is allow you to add a signature to the end of each post, which is only shown while being read in an RSS reader. You can customize the message your readers (and scrapers) see while reading your posts in a reader. Here’s what mine looks like:

What this will do is show the actual URL of the site the content originally came from. This way I can see in my track backs which sites are displaying this signature, thus allowing me to know whose copying me. It also lets readers who happen to find my work on another site know that they aren’t visiting a reliable source for their information.

Another way to see if you’re being copied is to run a search on Copyscape of other sites containing the same content as yours.

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