Cheers!

I’ve noticed strange things happen now when really popular blogs link to me a day later all the clone blogs link to me too as the replicate the story from the big blog.

One thing that has pissed me off is seeing people publish my newsletter articles without permission.

Now, although we had signed up legitimately (when this was a smaller service), they had grown in prominence and eventually were getting search engine hits for our keywords.

Our first line of attack was to contact the company and ask them to withdraw our content. They were slow to respond, so we cut down our feeds to avoid this continuing.

A site called hitslog has been aggregating my posts for months from seobuzzbox.com and still has not gone supplimental. In fact, before I got a few backlinks my posts went supplimental, what does that tell you? You got it, if you have enough backlinks and authority you can make it, weenie bloggers are collateral damage often in todays search.

Smart webmasters do not wait around for the primative search engines to get it right.

DRM on rss feeds anyone?

As they say the moment you put something online, it is open season, and nothing you can do can control the spread, except leaving it off line.

At least content thieves are using automated systems, then its not so bad. It could be out right plagarism by a human.

The above poster makes some valid points but I believe folks get a bit too paranoid at times with what the big G is or isn’t doing, thinking, or planning. The search engines also have a way of establishing a certain reputation with sites that have been around a while and I’m sure penalties, de-rankings and the like are not just dished out willy nilly, based on all the inevitable and automated comings and goings.

As my site MrRoomfinder is mainly Bangkok based, I’ve got back links coming in from some real dark and seedy forums from around the globe, including the world sex guide and all manner of weird places which cater for ladyboys bar girls and red light entertainment. Roomfinder doesn’t seem to have suffered as a result of this. You see, the thing about non-reciprocal links pointing to your web pages is that you often have no control over who’s linking to you and of course the SE’s know this.

I also think there’s a little too much concern over duplicated content and penalties. If you have your site cloned then that’s a different story. It’s the duplicated sites not duplicate content that gets a kick up the butt.

Think about it, Article Minor and the Ezine Articles directories plus all the other article directories out there, give out tens of thousands of the same articles every month. Many of these articles are used as valuable content on multiple websites. It’s the nature of their legit business.

However, these sites do not have the same page layout, they are not of equal bytes, and they do not use the same fonts, or font sizes, font colours, headers, graphics and all the rest of it. All they do is publish a bit of content available on through public domain.

If Google and the other SE’s wanted to go around giving penalties for every website that displayed an article that was picked up at a different location, they’d have very little time for anything else.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard of stories where some folks have their entire sites ripped off and Google throws their penalties at the wrong webmaster leaving the thief in-tact-and-ranked with his virtual swag. It’s just hearsay but sadly cloning does go on.

Aitch

Directly due to the duplicate content verbatim. Indirectly, in cases where scraped content does not include a link back to your site, it’s actually creating competition for your targeted keywords. In addition — even if there are links going back to your domain, in most cases the referring sites are not relevant to your topic so the inbound link has little to no positive impact on your ranking.

Plus, just as importantly, some of the sites where your scrapped content appears can be damaging to your reputation. We’ve had scraped content appear on sites with references to pornography and other junk we don’t want to be associated with.

For these and other reasons, we now use a summary feeds.

On the legal front, going straight to the offender’s host is a great suggestion. a few other things that you can do are:

* Step up the legal response by working with an attorney
* Put a strong copyright tag at the end of your original content posts (not Creative Commons)
* If you insist on using full feeds, insert a copyright message in your RSS feed

Since I’m already long here, and want to respect your comment area Yaro, I’ve expanded on these and other points over at Advanced Business Blogging. Your post was the catalyst for a two part series “Six Simple Steps to Combat Blog Content Theft, Ranking Degradation, and Damage to Your Reputation“. (Part one just went up.)

Thanks for the discussion! It’s time for all content theft victims to fight back.

If the content is on a persons web site just contact the host, for $8 per month a host could not be bothered to figure out if it is legit or not. They just don’t want to get sued over one customer. For other blogging sites I am sure they have legal departments you can contact and ask that the content is removed.

I also see the trend that some people seem to believe every published RSS-Feed and every photo that is published on flickr is free for any use.

Even if they provide links and subscribers: When they don’t ask and get permission, go after them by all means necessary.

I’d like to think that authority links and age of content protect us from the thieves but I still find it disheartening when I see my article on someone else’s site ranking well in the search engines.

I think in a lot of ways we just have to rely on Google et al to make ripping off content useless. Afterall most of these content rippers are using AdSense as their monetization strategy so if their pages don’t rank well they don’t make money.

The key is, I think, to make sure all the links on your site include the domain name. While some scrapers will strip all the links, the majority seem to just use the content as is, which means they will feed all the traffic back if the links are rooted.
Have you noticed that Gray Wolf recently added a copyright statement, pointing out what the correct URL should be, to his feed? Another way to appproach it.

As for the ‘dup content’ issue – I’ve never come across a suggestion that authority matters, I’ve only seen age discussed, ie the engines think the oldest reference to the material is the one that matters. Makes you wonder if we shouldn’t hold our feeds for 24 hours or so, just to let the bots come through us first… (and, really, who knows what rules the engines use! )

Now, They’re not even bothering to steal whole pieces . . . they start in mid-paragraph some of them. I suppose I wouldn’t mind if they asked and weren’t just using the content as ad fodder.
Liz

The sites ripping from rss also include links back to the original site too, which is fair enough to me. What i worry about are those that grab the raw text of the content w/ no links or attribution back to me. They’re the real danger because they could garner authority links themselves on the back of my content.