The more popular you become in the blogging world, the more crap you have to deal with!
Content scraping is one chore that can be dealt with swiftly once you understand what to do.
This post contains links which you can use to quickly and easily report content scrapers and spam blogs.
First step is to find your url’s which have been scraped of content and then get the scrapers spam blog removed.
Some of the tools i use to do this are:
Finding Scraped Content
Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and go to traffic > links to your site.
You should see something like this:
The first domain is a site which has copied and embedded my homepage which i have already dealt with.
The second site is a search engine.
The third domain is the one i want to deal with.
A common method scrapers use is to post the scraped content from your rss feed on to a free hosted blog like WordPress.com or blogger.com.
Once you click the WordPress.com link in webmaster tools, you’ll find all the url’s which have been scraped.
There’s 32 url’s which have been linked to so its simply a matter of clicking each of your links and finding the culprits.
The first link is my homepage which has been linked to by legit domains like WordPress developers.
The others are mainly linked to by spam blogs who have scraped the content and used a free hosted service which in this case is WordPress.com.
Reporting & Removing Spam Blogs
Once you have the url’s of the content scraping blogs as seen in the screenshot above:
- Fill in this basic form to report spam to WordPress.com
- Fill in this form to report copyright content to WordPress.com
- Use this form to report Blogspot and Blogger.com content which has been scraped.
- Fill in one of these forms to remove content from Google
Google Alerts
Its very easy to setup a Google alert to find your post titles when they get scraped.
If you’ve setup the WordPress SEO plugin correctly, you should have included your site title at the end of all your post titles.
Then all you need to do is setup a Google alert for your site title and you’ll be notified every time a scraper links to your content.
Link Notifications
You may also receive a pingback or trackback if you have this feature enabled in your discussion settings.
RSS Feed Links
Most content scrapers use automated software to scrape the content from RSS feeds.
Make sure you configure your Reading settings so only a summary is displayed.
Next step is to configure the settings in Yoast’s SEO plugin so links back to your site are included in all RSS feed post summaries.
This will help search engines identify you and your domain as the original author of the content.
There’s other services like copyscape and dmca which can help you protect your sites content if you’re prepared to pay a premium.
That’s it folks.
Its easy to find and get spam sites removed once you know what to do.
Hope you don’t have to deal with this garbage to often.
Ever found out your content has been scraped?
What did you do about it?
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