Andy Coates Blog

Kevin over at blogging tips brought up an interesting subject a couple of days ago about content stealing possibly being on the increase. Obviously this is quite an important subject if you are running your blog as a business as duplicate content on the internet can have a decremental affect to how search engines view you. Not only that if someone is blatantly stealing a large part your content without any credit this is plagiarism. There are some blogs out there which use scripts which grab parts of other peoples websites and blogs to provide their content which is known as scraping. These are a clever idea but completely unethical and I completely disagree with these sites. The main aim of these sites is to make money from advertising without doing any real work, once they are set up and scrape new content every day the owner needs to do very little work to keep it maintained.

Unfortunately there is very little you can do about this as there are no "web police" or authority to deal with this kind of dispute, nor should there ever be in my opinion. So here are a few tips what you can do if you find that someone has stolen some of your content.

1. Ask the offending webmaster to either remove your post or add a credit stating clearly that it came from your blog, it's probably worth getting traffic from these other blogs if you can!
2. Always link back to your own posts this way if someone does steal your content then they will most likely copy over your links too, again this will direct people back to your site from the offending theft!
3. Where applicable add dates and events into your posts, if someone steals or scrapes your content which is 2 years old and someone reads from the offending site they will immediately see that it is out of context.
4. I the offending site is a MFA (made for Adsense) site you could report this to Google, be careful though as you must be sure that the author has deliberately stolen your content and are looking to profit from Adsense with it.
5. Add a footer at the bottom of your post stating that you are clearly the writer etc….(also you could use my mischievous linking technique to promote other parts of your website)

Please feel free to copy these tips in your blog but make sure you credit me with a note and a back link.

Written by Andy Coates
Copyright: Andy Coates Dot Com
July 2007

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