October 22, 2022 | Posted in WordPress
As a website owner, it can be disheartening to see someone else using your material without your permission, outranking you on search engines, and stealing your audience. To prevent this from happening, it’s important to understand what blog content scraping is, how to minimize and prevent it, and even how to use it to your advantage.
As a website owner, it may be quite upsetting to see someone else selling your material without your consent, outranking you in Google, and stealing your audience.
In this post, we will discuss what blog content scraping is, how you may minimize and even avoid content scraping, and how you can even use content scraping to your advantage.
The process of taking information from many blogs and publishing it on another website is known as “blogging content scraping.” In most cases, this is handled automatically via the RSS feed associated with your blog.
The process of content scraping has become so simple in recent years that almost anybody can set up a WordPress website, pick a free or paid theme, and install a few plugins that will automatically scrape information from several blogs.
The question of “why are they taking my content?” is a common one. The simple answer is that your material is valuable and in demand. However, there are several reasons why someone may scrape your content, such as earning affiliate commission, generating leads, or making money through advertising.
Affiliate commission
Some shady affiliate marketers out there only intend to take advantage of the system to earn a few more dollars. They will leverage not just your material but also the content of others to drive visitors to their website using search engines. These websites often cater to a certain subgroup, and as a result, they promote various goods connected to that subgroup.
Prospect Generation
This is something that we often see real estate agents and attorneys doing. They seek to project the image of being industry leaders in the areas they serve. They cannot develop high-quality material, so instead of creating their own, they steal it from other websites. Because they are paying some scumbag $30 a month to add content and help them get higher SEO, sometimes they are unaware of this fact. In the past, we have encountered many situations like this one.
Advertising Earnings
There are some people whose only goal is to establish a “hub” of information one-stop-shop for customers operating within a certain market segment. We often become aware that the material on our website is being harvested. The scraper will invariably respond by saying, “I was doing this for the benefit of the community.” Except that the website is covered with advertisements.
These are just some of the reasons why someone could steal your stuff.
Detecting and eliminating content scrapers is a laborious process that may consume a significant amount of time. There are just a few methods that you can use to catch those who are scraping your material.
Yes, it hurts just as much as it sounds like it would. This strategy certainly isn’t worth it, particularly if you’re writing on a popular subject.
Trackbacks
If you include internal links in your postings, you will be alerted through a trackback if another website takes the material from your blog. This approach is essentially the scraper informing you that they are extracting stuff from your website.
If you have Akismet installed on your website, many of these trackbacks will be moved to the SPAM folder. Once again, for this to function, you need to have internal links inside your postings.
Ahrefs
You will be able to monitor your backlinks and keep an eye out for material that has been stolen if you have access to an SEO tool such as Ahrefs.
How to Deal with Websites That Scrape Your Content
When dealing with content scrapers, individuals often choose one of three approaches: the Do Nothing method, the Take-Down approach, or the Take Advantage of their approach.
The Do Nothing Method
In this way, you can simplify your life considerably. It is common practice for the most prominent blogs to advocate this since it requires significant work to combat the scrapers.
If it is a well-known blog such as Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Problogger, or one of the many others out there, they certainly do not need to be concerned about it. According to Google, these are authoritative websites.
However, several legitimate websites have been labeled scrapers because Google believed the scraped material was original. Accordingly, we do not believe that this strategy is usually the most effective.
This completely opposes the “Do Nothing Approach.” In this method, you would get in touch with the scraper and request that they remove the material from their site.
Should they fail to comply with your demands or not respond to them, you have the option of filing a DMCA complaint with their hosting provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
From what we’ve seen, most websites scrape content and do not provide a way for users to get in touch with the site. If they do, then you should make use of it. You will need to do a Whois Lookup if they do not have a contact form.