How to Prevent Content Scraping in WordPress
Do you want to prevent content scraping in WordPress?
It is very annoying when you get to know that someone stole your content without your permission, making money out of it, outranking you in Google, and robbing your audience.
This article will share How to Prevent Content Scraping in WordPress.
What Is Content Scraping?
Content scraping is when content is stolen from multiple sources, and the stolen content is then republished on another site without the knowledge and permission of the owner.
Some content scrapers copy your blog’s content, but most scrappers use automatic software that stole the content from your RSS feed.
It has become so easy now that anyone can start a WordPress website, using a free or commercial theme, installing a few plugins, and then robbing content from selected blogs and republishing them as their own.
How to Catch Content Scrapers?
Catching content scrapers is a tiresome task and can take up a lot of time. There are a few ways that you can witness content scrapers.
1. Perform a Google Search
It is the easiest way of finding the content scrapers who are robbing your content. You have to perform a Google Search with the titles of your posts. While it does sound like a tedious method of finding them, there are probabilities that you may come across a few.
2. Trackbacks
Using internal links in your posts will get a trackback when a website robs your content and links back to you. This way, you can spot the content scraper without much effort.
But, if you are using Akismet, many of these trackbacks will show up in your spam folder. You have to go through those to spot them as well. Note: This method only works if you have internal links.
3. Ahrefs- The SEO Toolset
You can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to observe your backlinks and watch out for your scraped content.
4. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools can also help you to find scrapers. Below the ‘Traffic’ area, you will notice an option named ‘Links to Your Site.’ There are possibilities that you will find some scrapers on this list. There may be lots of links that are pointing to your pages.
5. Use Google Alerts
This tool helps you to get notifications whenever a certain keyword gets indexed on Google. You can also utilize it to find content scrapers.
Whenever you publish a post, you can set up a Google Alert for the exact title of your post. You will be notified when someone does content scraping and republishes a post with the same title.
How to Deal with Content Scrapers
You can deal with content scrapers in many different ways: the Do Nothing Approach, Take Down approach, or Take Advantage approach.
Let’sLet’s take a look at each one.
1. The Do-Nothing Approach
This is the easiest and simplest approach you can take. Generally, most popular bloggers follow this because it takes too much time to fight the scrapers and waste energy.
The famous blogs do not worry about it all because they are the authority website in googles eye.
However, this approach is not suitable for others because the smart content scrappers present the stolen posts as their own, and the original website becomes the scrapers in Google’s eye.
2. Take Down Approach
This approach is opposite to the ‘Do Nothing Approach.’ In this approach, contact the scrappers directly and ask them to take back the content.
You can also demand to give you credit as the original content source. If they disagree, you can file a (DCMA) Digital Millennium Copyright Act with their server host.
The other way you can take them down is by redirecting them to a dummy feed, where you can send them huge text feeds of gibberish or even send them back to their own server. Later, it will result in an infinite loop that will crash their website.
3. Limit Individual IP Addresses
When you get to know who steals your content, you should block the IPs from which it is scraping your content.
Access your logs for their IP address, and then block it with something like this in your root .htaccess file:
Deny from 123.456.789
How to Take Advantage of Content Scrapers
This approach helps to take advantage of content scrapers. It can help you make extra bucks and help in your SEO as well.
Most of the content scrapers use your RSS Feed to Robb your content. So you can take advantage of them by following ways:
1. Adding Internal Links –
It is essential to create as many interlinks as possible within your site. These links point to your other articles relevant to the one readers are currently reading. The internal links in your article help you increase page views and reduce the bounce rate on your site.
Secondly, When someone loots your content, they may keep these links intact. And that can help you get backlinks from the people stealing your content.
Lastly, it allows you to swipe their audience. You have to place your inlinks on interesting keywords and make it tempting to click them. When this article is robbed, the audience of the scraper’s website may click on it too. This way, you will also end up stealing the scraper’s audience.
2. Auto Link Keywords with Affiliate Links –
Following content scraping, there are possibilities that you may lose some traffic. But, you can still take advantage of that by adding affiliate links to certain keywords. You can use plugins such as SEO Smart Links, Ninja Affiliate, and ThirstyAffiliates to replace assigned keywords with affiliate links automatically.
3. Utilizing RSS Footer –
The All in One SEO Plugin helps to add custom items to your RSS Footer. You can use your footer to add anything you want.
For example- You can promote your own products to their RSS readers by adding banners. Once someone steals your content, those banners will also appear on your scraper’s website. By this, you can get a backlink to your original article from scraper’s site, which lets the search engines, Google, and others know that you are the authority.
4. Reduce and Prevent Content Scraping – Full vs. Summary RSS Feed
Aside from interlinking, auto-linking keywords with affiliate links, and Utilizing RSS Footer, you can switch to a summary RSS feed.
There is a debate in the blogging community whether to have a full RSS feed or summary RSS feed. Without going into details, one of the benefits of having a Summary Only RSS feed is that it helps to prevent content scraping in WordPress.
You can change the settings by visiting your WordPress admin panel and navigating to Settings » Reading. There, change the settings for each article in a feed show summary.
In this way, only the summary for the RSS feed will be visible, and the content scrapers will not be able to steal the complete feed.
To Conclude
Content scraping is when content is stolen and then republished on another site without the knowledge and permission of the owner. Here, we have discussed how you can catch content scrappers, how to deal with them, and how to take advantage of content scrappers. And finally, how you can prevent content scraping in WordPress.
We hope this article helped you!