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.
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