Scrappers steal content from RSS feeds and post it as new posts – and they don’t care who the original author is. Some scrappers use manual means to scrape – simply copying and pasting to their websites.
Despite the fact that scrapping is bad for the Web, there are inherent link-building opportunities in it and every blogger needs to know how to take advantage of it. This article gives you tips on how to find those sites that are scraping from you and how to benefit from it or take them down.
How to Track Content Scrapers
Content scrapers have come of age and most of them have different techniques to scrape content from your site without you knowing. One of the most effective manual ways to catch them in the act is by carrying out a Google search for the topics you write on your blog. However, the results of this are limited to a couple of Google results. Here are some of the automated ways to catch content scrappers on your website.
Duplicate Content Checker ‘PlagSpotter
This is an effective tool that you can use to detect those sites that steal content from you. It’s a search engine that crawls the web for all forms of content. You can determine who has stolen content from you merely by testing a URL in its search. With a premium membership, you can discover what pages have been copied and so on.
Having Trackbacks
Trackbacks can help you detect direct scrappers who steam content from your website. Ideally, the trackbacks will give you paths to websites that have stolen the content from your website. These trackbacks are more common on WordPress compared to other CMS’s. However, just because you have trackbacks on your website doesn’t mean you will rank well or benefit from the link. The secret is in linking within the site with rich anchor text that can give you link juice when scrapped.
Google Webmaster
The Google Webmaster tool is a great resource for discovering scrappers of your site content. You need to check within the sites linking to you and if these sites links come from regular posts, then it could mean these are either die-hard fans for your blog, social followers or scrappers.
Google Alerts
The Google alerts are some of the most effective ways to discover those who scrape content from you. Scrapers will always steal most of your content and setting alerts for topics you write can enable you to detect such publishers as soon as they put the posts up. This can help you discover scrappers at work and take action.
How to Get the Links From Scrappers
When scrappers steal your content, there are a number of things you can do to benefit, especially if you run your site on WordPress. The RSS footer plugin can ensure you get the credit you deserve for the creative content that you create. In the process, the content can also give you link backs to your website. These links can help your website improve in the SERPs.
How to Deal with Scrappers
Scrappers have discovered ways of living off the sweat of others without giving credit. This means that you have to take them down the hard way. For sites that are hosted, the hosts are the best people to contact for a take down. The DMCA is another route you can take to ensure that your authentic work benefits you.
How to Fix Duplicate Content on the Website
There are different techniques you can use to fix duplicate content on a website.
- Setting the preferred version of the website’s domain is the most effective way to deal with duplicate content. This means you expressly tell the search engines which domain; the www or non-www version of the website you prefer indexing.
- Using the Google Webmaster tools to set the preferred version of the website is another way to solve this problem.
- Using canonicalization tags in the website’s Meta data helps search engines know what URLs to index or give authority to. The advantage of the canonicalization is that it’s quite easy to implement and there are several ways to implement on different CMS platforms whether it is WordPress, Joomla or CMS made simple.
Jeremy Steel. Post from: SiteProNews
How to Detect Duplicate Content on Your Website and How to Deal With It