Saturday 8 October 2011

Protect Your Work Against Plagerism And The Deviously Lazy Auto Blogger



In the last 6 months many of my articles have been stolen by other sites. The internet is full of people trying to promote their and as we search the net we come across a lot of bad content. But now instead of creating good content some people choose to steal it from others.

Auto blogging
This is where someone uses a programme which automatically takes information from other web pages (referred to as scraping) to fill their own site.  They claim it's sharing work that people wanted to share widely any way. But the work is often not credited to the original author and can have small alterations. It also goes high on Google search results, often even higher than the original site. Which damages the original traffic to the original author.

Theft
This is the best word for it however anyone tries to auto blogging. They're profiting from other people's unique work. I put a lot of time and effort into my content as do thousands of others. Why should it be ripped off for someone else's greed? What's worse is that some of my content ended up on sites which I am morally opposed to. Sites promoting things like gambling and even pornography. This can not be ignored.

How to tackle it

Disable RSS Feeds
People will find your blog if you keep producing good content. RSS could be useful but they're the main gateway to auto blogger finding and ripping out content. It is useful that you can disable RSS feeds with blogger as it isn't possible to do this with all blog sites.

Put a copyright notice on your articles
You don't have to do this as you automatically own your own work but is will show anyone reading an infringing site where the article belongs and hopefully they will contact you.

Do regular search engine checks
Check to see if any of your distinct articles have been stolen.

Report to Google
Google is quite quick at dealing with reported pages often within a couple of days. Some people recommend contacting the infringing site first but I've stopped doing this. It's simply a matter of time. I've wasted too much time having to report the dozens of articles that were plagiarised to Google. So I wont waste time writing to the content thieves.

Here's a link for the report form.

If the infringing page uses adsense or adwords the sites normally remove the content quicker as they risk losing they're accounts. If they don't advertise on the page they may not respond at all but Google will still remove them from their search results.



Copyright © Nathan Groves http://wondersandparodies.blogspot.com/
This Work Is Not To Be Reproduced With Out Permission.



6 comments:

mtrguanlao said...

Nice article,this should be read by many. Good pointers.

Paul T. said...

Instead of completely disabling the RSS feeds on my blogs, I changed the settings so that only short excerpts would be published in the RSS feeds. That way auto-blogging software will not be able to steal the whole article via RSS.

Another idea is to add a link to your full post in the excerpts so that if the excerpt gets scrapped, at least you have a free backlink to your original post.

That way you would still have an RSS feed available for people to subscribe to and receive lots of extra traffic, that would otherwise be lost.

Nathan Groves said...

It's an option but even the excerpt option can show high in rankings taking traffic away from your original page. If people want to follow your page they'll remember it and conme back.

John said...

Good post. I was wondering how to protect my work and I'll take your suggestions into account. You might also want to try http://www.copyscape.com/ to check if your content has been copied by someone else on the web.

RCB said...

Many of your articles have been stolen... now why doesn't that surprise me? http://rcbenglishclass.blogspot.com/2011/11/successful-plagiarism-revisited-when.html

BettyBoop said...

Thanks...I posted this on my FB site....Terrible what people do, eh..?

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