Make Money from Blogs » Scrape

Stop Plagiarism: Add backlinks to your content feed

ashish — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:06:09 +0000

RSS feeds give a very easy to get your content up on other sites. Not a very good thing, given that a person looking to get some quick (and steal some content written after a lot of effort) content up on their site would just need to subscribe to your content, and then use this feed (through a plugin) to get this content up on their site. It is very easy to setup a plugin that will take this content from a RSS feed, and automatically get this content up on their site.
Now, there are many reasons as to why you want to not restrict your RSS feed to provide only a summary. If you do restrict your RSS feed to only have a short summary, then it will help in your battle against people who are copying your content, but think of the other implications on your regular readers. There are people who prefer to read content directly through their RSS readers, and you need to evaluate whether you want to cater to this group. However, many such readers are an important part of spreading the content of your blog, given that they spread such links to other people if they like the content. Further, you can place ads in these feeds and hope to make some money from these once you have enough people reading your feeds.
One way in which you can detect that such a problem exists is by adding a few backlinks in your RSS feed. People who manually copy the content can in some cases figure out that backlinks exist, and manually remove these links. Automated solutions have a very high probability of not determining these backlinks. The advantage of backlinks is that you will get a trackback onto your blog that will point to the copy blog. (Keep in mind that you will not derive any Page Rank benefit from these backlinks, as the other blog may not be in high standing with Google).

State your copyright policy cleanly on your blog – Use CreativeCommons.org

ashish — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:18:58 +0000

So, you are now starting getting aware of the grave problem where people steal content available on the internet, and display it on their own sites as their own content, without a credit link or any other way to demonstrate that it is in fact your own content. Of course, they did not ask you for permission, and in some cases, even if they had asked you for permission, you would not have given it – and that is your legal right. Nobody can take content from your site and show it on their site without permission, and if anybody is doing it and claiming that this is the internet, and they are sharing free content, they are actually stealing. If you have posted content on a site, even if it available for others to read and review, the copyright remains yours.
Those who steal content can be of many types – there can be the ones who steal content in an automated way, since they have automated site scrapers, or they have a tool that takes RSS content and automatically publishes it. There are others who are brazen enough to download content and could not care about any legal warnings, or the like. If you were to send them a letter asking for them to stop this stealing, they would ignore you. And then there are the third kind, who copy content, but will be put off if they see some kind of legal warning. And these are the types of people you can stop by doing the next step.
You can put a small copyright policy on your blog such that it stops people from copying your content, and one easy way of doing that is through a site called http://creativecommons.org/. On this site, you can setup a copyright policy by asking a few questions, and you get a small HTML cope that you include in the template on your site. If you go to the specific site called http://creativecommons.org/choose/, you can specify whether you want your content to be copied to be used for commercial purposes, or even prevent modification of your work. Read more of the site:

With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here. For those new to Creative Commons licensing, we’ve prepared a list of things to think about. If you want to offer your work with no conditions or you want to certify a work as public domain, choose one of our public domain tools.

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You find your site content copied, and available on another site. What next ?

ashish — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:12:59 +0000

For those of you who fight plagiarism, the path to detecting and fighting those who have copied your content is not easy in many cases. Consider the following situation:
- You write some great content, and are excited that maybe many of such posts will get you promoted to a higher position in the Google search result
- You suddenly find that your good, exclusive content is available on another blog (don’t get surprised, people can actually copy your content no matter what you do)
- You find that multiple sites have copied your content
- You want to start the first step of contacting the blog owner or admin and telling them not to copy your blog’s content without permission
- And then you find out that the other blog does not provide any contact information for the blog’s owners or admin
Now what do you do ? Well, fret not. One solution is to use Whois tools (there are multiple sites providing Whois information – consider using this one ‘http://www.domaintools.com/‘). Once you get to this tool, enter the host name in the domain search, and move to the bottom where contact information will be entered. and then send an email to the emails mentioned in those contacts.