How to get link love from scrapers

Scraper sites are always a problem for blog publishers, but don’t worry because there is a way to fight back.

Scrapers are sites that steal content from a blog by syndicating its RSS feeds then republishing those stolen content in another blog usually peppered with ads. By stealing content, they get to earn from their own ad clicks but the worse thing is, they even compete with the original blog in terms of “duplicate content.”

When there are several versions of a blog article in several sites, search engines like Google still find it difficult to determine the original author of the duplicate content. How important is it to be recognized as such? Well, for one, Google ranks higher a site it thinks is the original author of an article. How would you feel if you wrote a unique post then was copied by another site and yet that scraper site was #1 on the search result and yours was nowhere near the first page?

Fortunately, you can fight back. Here’s how.

One is incorporate links to your homepage or to previously-written blog posts within the article itself.

An example of this at work is the first paragraph of the article Valentina Hasan sings ‘Ken Lee’. Notice the links to three other PMT articles. This way, you can get a linkback once scrapers repost the stolen content.

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If you’re using Wordpress, you can also use a plugin that lets you add footers to your RSS feeds. Through these feed footer plugins, you can put a link to your site or your own link ads, and also a warning to feed reader that the article may have been stolen. That way, everytime one of your articles is reposted, you still can get link love from the scrapers.

In our case, we are using BlogClout’s Feed Footer plugin. It lets you add up to 10 different footers to your RSS feeds. We also have a note in our feed footer saying,

This article was originally posted at PinoyMoneyTalk.com. If you’re reading this elsewhere, it’s likely copied WITHOUT permission!

Good enough to tell readers that the article they are reading come from this website.

If you don’t want to use that one, you can use similar plugins such as the RSS Footer plugin or RSS Signature plugin.

We may not be able to totally kill scraper sites but at least now we have a way to fight them.

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