If a large portion of content is present within a domain or across domains, it is called duplicate content.

If you are blogger, I’m sure you would have come across the word “duplicate content”.

Image Source: Fight Club by Polina Sergeeva

You are either a blogger who is writing informational blog posts or one of the very few who scrapes content from other blogs. There are only those two categories. You can’t be in between.

As long as you belong to number one, you don’t have to worry about Google penalty. Of course, there is another problem for you. You have to worry at the nights about those who scrape your content and make money while you are writing quality original information and still waiting for the huge paychecks to arrive.

You have the choice. You can ignore them and let Google handle them or you can take a step forward and do what you can to get the site down. The choice is yours. There is no wrong in letting Google handle it but there is going to be more and more blogs stealing your content if you don’t take action.

Now let me take you to the world where bloggers steal content. I’m talking about bloggers who are doing it on purpose. I’m not targeting the bloggers who have writers that scrape content without their knowledge. Although I should warn you to do a test for most of your articles at Copyscape soon else you are risking your brand.

Side Note: If you are a Kumbaya blogger, you won’t steal content.

Mighty Google

First we’ll start with why you should not let the giants of the search, Google, handle content thieves.

Though Google say that they will penalize the sites or blogs that has duplicate content within or across domains, you can see many blogs doing it and escaping from the penalty.

There are about thousands of websites that has the same article going.

Ever heard about article directories? That is one of the biggest examples of duplicate content. I’m not blaming the article directory owners or the article marketers who do it the right way. But there are always people who try to game the system.

Pick up an article that is doing very well in a particular article directory and put it at copyscape. What do you find? Duplicate content. Or go to Problogger and copy a headline of one of the posts and search for it in Google. You’ll find all the blogs stealing every single post written at Problogger. Darren Rowse has written about duplicate content before. His blog is very popular and is naturally a target for blog scrapers. I have had my content copied before. Kevin of Blogging Tips has written about content theft a few times before like: Social Rank – The New Breed Of Blog Scraping and Don’t Get Stressed About Blog Scrapers Stealing Your Content.

The worst part is, these scrapers still get their blog posts indexed in search engines and receive traffic. The main reason is there are millions of sites that have duplicate content and Google cannot take action on everyone of them.

So I don’t think Google can do much about duplicate content, at least not till they come with a new idea to stop this.

For the bloggers who work their sweat off to write articles only to find it in some other blog word for word copied using RSS feed of your blog, here is a way to stop RSS feed scrapers from stealing your content. I don’t know of a way to stop copy-paste method using a plugin. Let me know if you have a solution for it. If you don’t like to take action, at least get something out of their work. Install RSS footer plugin and get a backlink from them. This will at least let Google know that your content is the original one (Thanks to Daniel for this tip).

I personally don’t like people who do it and normally advice everyone not to do it. But when Google cannot stop people, I don’t expect the world to change by listening to me.

Now comes the best part…

What YOU And I Can Do About It?

You have every right for your content and you cannot let others use it as their own.

Most people steal content to earn money from AdSense or sell affiliate products. Report to the owner of the product which these scrapers are promoting and get their affiliate link invalid. That way they won’t earn money. If they use AdSense, you can get their account banned by contacting Google. But still your content remains in their blog. Now what you can do is, report to the hosting provider where the blog is hosted. You can find where the blog is hosted using this site – WhoIsHostingThis.

Once you find the host, go and complain to the host. Show them the proof. Most likely they will bring the site down. You can also follow any of these 10 ways to fight back content thieves.

I can’t believe why people are not using social media sites like twitter for this. Seriously, all it takes is one tweet. Everyone is ready to help you if you need it. (Side Note: I like how Jonathan Fields starts his day in twitter every morning saying “Morning, great people. Who can I help today?”)

If you take a moment to get help from your followers to bring down the site, you can pull down the site faster. I’m sure Darren Rowse can get all the sites that steals his content in a single tweet. Think about it. Almost every hosting provider is there in twitter. If someone can tweet something like “@hostprovider This blog at Loser.com is scraping my blog’s content at Rockstar.Com” and many people retweet the message, you can instantly get in touch with the host provider. Sometimes you don’t even need your followers to retweet. Now all you need to do it prove them that you are the real owner of the content.

It only takes a minute to do this. Don’t let others to steal your content.

Have you had your blog content scraped? What did you do about it? Please share your views in the comments.

Thanks to pettre (no link) from Authority Blogger forum for the idea for this post.

If you found this post to be useful, please share it with your friends and tweet it to your followers.

Are you taking full advantage of forum marketing that gets you free targeted traffic? Are you doing it the right way or do you make these mistakes?

If you have no idea what forum marketing is, let me explain.

Forum marketing is a technique where you post in forums, help people, gain trust and convert those people who you helped into your blog readers.

How do you find forums that are related to your blog?

If you know how to do this, I suggest you to skip this paragraph and start reading the next. For others, go to Google and do a search for “your niche forum” without quotes. If you want clearer explanation, see this post I wrote sometime back on how to find forums in your niche.

Once you are done with finding forums, read this post for the common mistakes people make when posting on forums. To those people who are already using forums, you might be making these mistakes. It is never late to correct your mistakes.

Source: Authority Blogger Forum (one of my favorite forums) owned by Chris Garrett.

Okay. You are set now? Let’s see the mistakes bloggers commonly make.

7.Not Posting Regularly

Confession: I don’t post regularly in forums and I want to change myself when it comes to consistency.

People will forget you if you are not posting regularly. Many people (including me) post to forums like crazy for the first few days after joining. After a week, they completely forget about the forum. Bad marketing.

Building trust doesn’t happen in one day or one week. It takes more than that. I know people in some forums who are regular posters for 3-4 years. These people are trusted by everyone in the forum. If they have a product and they say one word about it, everyone will buy it. That is the power of building trust in forums. You can even sell your service easily once you build trust.

How to fix it: Make a commitment to posting certain number of replies in forums or have a fixed amount of time you want to spend in forums.

6. One Line Posts

One line posts are same as one line comments. You cannot build trust or convey what you want to say in one line. Unless you are thanking someone or congratulating someone for what they have done, you can’t help in one line.

If building trust in one line was possible, people would start using twitter more. If you are representing a company and you are answering a quick question, one line is fine. But most companies would send email detailing their one line answer.

How to fix it: When someone asks a question, elaborate on your answer. You don’t have to write it very big. Elaborate till you feel the other person will understand what you have written.

5. Copy and Paste

Some people create threads by copy and pasting the same message in different forums. Just like you, the people in your niche visit many forums and if they see you creating the same message over and over in all the forums, they’ll start ignoring you. I don’t see why you want to ask the same question in all the forums unless it is not answered.

How to fix it: Always create a thread in only one forum. If it is not answered, start a thread in another forum. Even if you are giving a valuable tip, please don’t copy paste. Make small changes to the post and the headline. Make it look like you have written again.

4. Irrelevant Posts

There is no better way to destroy your personal brand than by writing irrelevant posts. This is not very common but I know some people make this mistake. Why in the world do you talk about a method which pays you a huge one cent for every ad you click in a golfing forum? I understand it is a lot of money. If you are making one cent for every ad click, then you will be living an “internet guru” lifestyle. I can see that you want others also to be rich like you, but please, not in a golfing forum.

How to fix it: Stop posting irrelevant things and start contributing to the quality of the forum.

3. Affiliate Links

This is the most common mistake people make. When you go to forums and have affiliate links in your signature, it will mostly lead to your profile getting banned. Read the TOS of the forum before you start using it. Some forums allow you to use affiliate links in signature but when you have affiliate links in signature, you cannot build trust. If you link to your own product, it is different and there is no wrong in doing it. Only when it comes to affiliate links, the problem starts. See forums as twitter. In twitter, will you post affiliate links? If you do, how many people unfollow you?

You can also imagine a real life situation. You talk to a stranger. He asks you a question and you say buy this product under my referral and it will solve your problems. What are the chances that the stranger will buy the product? Zero possibility unless you are an extremely good sales person. But then if you are a good sales person, you would obviously not need these tips.

How to fix it: Instead of posting affiliate links, send the people to your blog. Give them loads of free information and then sell.

2. PM Spam

You already know what PM spam is and there is 99.98% chance that you are victim of PM spam if you are a member of the digital point forum.

What is PM spam? (for those who don’t know or not a member of DP forum)

PM is short for private messaging. When you register in a forum, you are given an inbox without email ID. Anyone can send you private message in a single click. This makes it easy for people to spam.

When you send me a PM selling your product, you are helping me by filtering yourself out of people who I trust.

How to fix it: If you have a product and you want to promote, contribute quality posts to the forum and have a link to your product (not affiliate) in your signature. This will help you sell your product. Don’t waste your time sending a PM to all the members. No one will buy it. Period.

1. Being Rude

I see arguments in forums very often. Arguments are fine as long as they are within certain limits. If you are rude, I’m not going to click on your signature link and come to your blog. You may think I’m the only one who is not going to visit your blog. But mind you, almost everyone who is reading it will lose the trust they have in you slowly.

Thanks to the forum scripts, most of them don’t allow swear words. If you use them, it won’t get published. But hey, we are people who have been using internet since it came into existence. We know how to bypass everything. So what we do is, we use asteriks. Simple. Let me tell you again, being rude is not good for your personal brand.

How to fix it: Simple. Care for everyone in the forum. When you care, you won’t be rude.

I suggest you to use forum marketing. It not only gets new readers to your blog but also helps you become a better blogger.

Do you make any of the above forum marketing mistakes? I feel guilty of not regularly posting in forums. I have been working on it though. Please share your views and also some other mistakes people make in forums.