My WordPress feed is being scraped.
Posted on Wednesday the 23rd of January, 2008 at 5:11 pm in NewsOh yay…yippee…It seems that lately most everything that I post — especially posts about WordPress — are being auto-scraped and ending up displayed in “feed-reader” websites that are just the next generation of splogs. So what am I doing about it to protect my WordPress blog? Simple. I’m adding more links to my past posts.
The sites claim that they aren’t doing anything wrong, and I do have to give their arguments credit, so here is the catch: if they remove the links, then they are modifying my content and aren’t “just another feedreader”, so I can report them, if they leave them in, I can get a little more traffic and “google juice” — although the later is falling in importance and relevancy —, or if they notice this post and remove my site from their list, I get what I really want. It is basically a win-tie-win scenario here.
I apologize if they are irritating to normal readers, but they are always pseudo-relevant links, so I’m not spamming you guys in response to being spammed.
P.S. Not all seem to be scraped, so I’m wondering how many times I need to say WordPress in a post about WordPress to get the WordPress “web reader” to borrow the content from my WordPress site?
You’re probably being scraped by the same guy as my site. His claims of being a legitimate feed reader are baloney, since feed readers aren’t meant for mass consumption.
What kind of links are you adding to past posts that you hope will help you?
Reply to MiriamThe links are just normal internal links. For example, in one of my posts yesterday, normally I wouldn’t have added any links to it, but this time I added links to a couple category names. I also have links to the tag pages directly embedded in my feeds.
The site that seems to be scraping my wordpress feeds is wp-wordpress, but I keep getting trackbacks from a couple religious and historical sites.
Reply to AaronGood idea! wp-wordpress is the one scraping mine, and many other, sites too. I’ve asked him to stop, but he’s playing the part of the innocent angel.
Reply to MiriamUse the RSS signature plugin.
You may not be able to stop them but at least you will get a backlink.
Reply to InfonoteJust modifying your content a little doesn’t give them license to use it. Your written work is copyrighted and you can sent them a DMCA notice, or contact their hosting company to shut them down. I think the “Google Juice” is negated by the duplicate content penalty that you may get from google. You can stop scraping by finding the scrapers IP and adding a rewrite command to your .htaccess. Just google it for instructions.
Reply to Matt