Blogger Tips - SEO Strategy for Blogging - Squeaky's Madmouse Blog

One thing you can count on in this ever changing world, there will always be a few unscrupulous individuals who will blatantly steal your “blog content” . The term most widely used for this is referred to as, “scraping“. It isn’t even a matter if, it is just a matter of when these unethical individuals get around to you.
These people, “thief’s or also referred to as bottom feeders,” scrounge up their victims on the Internet searching for bloggers who are becoming popular and provide full RSS feeds. It is just another day for these bottom feeders trying to make a quick buck off your ideas and hard earned work. It is pretty lame, but it is TRUE!
I have heard many victims of blog scrapers, state that maybe they should be “flattered” that someone is stealing their content, but believe me, that just isn’t the kind of flattery that a professional blogger wants. You have worked hard to build your blog and reputation, so you deserve all of the recognition!

The most common method used to steal your content, is to just grab it from your RSS feed. Furthermore, this also explains why many bloggers publish only a partial RSS feed to avoid scraping. The problem is, partial RSS feeds are usually not read because most readers find them annoying and inconvenient, and you lose readers on account of this.

There are some simple things which you can do to prevent scrapers from stealing your RSS feeds when you use the full-feeds function.

If a site has stolen your site content without your authorization, then it is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As long as you can provide enough conformation to verify your complaint, you can file a DMCA with any of the search engines deemed. If the offenders site is using Adsense, you can also file a complaint with Google at their DMCA Adsense page.

It has been suggested that you contact the scraper directly, but most of the time you will only find out what you already know: they have stolen your site content from your site’s RSS feed. In addition, if this wasn’t bad enough, some of the people, actually have the nerve to ask you to link to them! For the most part, this is really a coin toss, it really depends on you and how much patience you have to deal with such things as this.

If you would like to stop people from HotLinking linking to your images, javascript, swf, and CSS files. Just modify your .htaccess file with the following code. Code provided by: Search-This

# START HotLinking Prevention
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond {HTTP_REFERER} !^
RewriteCond {HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yourdomain.com/.* [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg) - [F]
# END HotLinking Prevention

The above code will display broken images if they have linked to you. If you would like to get a little more creative, you can design your own custom image to display!

Just change the following line:
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg) - [F]
to:
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg) http://www.yourdomain.com/do-not-scrap-do-not-steal.gif [R,L]

Please note: You will need to replace “yourdomain.com” with your domain name for this to work. Also, if you decide to use a custom image, be sure to upload it to your server and name it appropriately.

You can also implement the RSS Footer WordPress plugin, created by, Joost de Valk. For more details, please read my prior post called, Stop! Blog Scrappers with the RSS Footer, WordPress Plugin. This plugin, will make sure you get the credit that is due to you!

I hope this post is helpful to you, and if you have any suggestions, please comment away.

Squeaky….

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