Content Scraping and Website Rankings
Content scraping refers to the numerous websites that take advantage of the hard work of decent content creators by plucking your content and reusing it within their own pages. This can be doubly frustrating when a scraping website ranks higher than you using your own content.
Content scrapers can make good money from re-publishing other people’s work so there are thousands of these unscrupulous individuals out there whose website traffic models are based on stealing your publications. Many sites gain rankings with shady material to establish adverts and other advantages gained from high indexing rates.
Ping Your Feed
If you publish content onto a feed such as RSS or XML you need to ping the post to a major tracking service for blogs and feed content. The major blog monitoring services such as Technorati, Google, Yahoo! etc. will offer advice on how to ping to their sites.
Services such as Pingomatic can automatically ping your publication when it goes live.
Use Absolute Links
When a content scraper duplicated your content, they will often neglect to alter internal links within the page. By ensuring that all of the links that you use include the complete address of the genuine source, the copied material will point back to your original website.
eg.
This is a relative link:
<a href=”../>Home</a>
This is an absolute link:
<a href=”http://Rump.com”>Home</a>
By using absolute links the search engines follow the link and recognise that this is where the content originated from.
Legal Action
Once a site gets popular, it’s content will become noticed more and more by scrapers and you will have multiple copies of your content re-published throughout the web. When the scraping begins to effect the ranking of your website, you may wish to consider legal action.
A DMCA takedown offers you a legal opportunity to remove content scraped from your website. The legal approach, however may only work within countries that operate under the same laws.