My Content Got Copied – What Next ?

Most of us who blog or maintain a website must have experienced it sometime or the other. Your hard worked content gets copied by some other website just as it is without a mention of your website. While this is an extremely irritatting and often frightening experience ( if you are have heard too much about duplicate content penalty) for some people , I can assure you that scraping of your website would not typically not get you penalised or get any negative effect on your website from the search engines perspective. Let’s look at the reasons..

a) Generally such scraping of website would be done by new websites or sites that are struggling to establish their own presense. In such case even if Google indexes their page they would not be getting any benefit out of it. Your site, assumably with better authority than th scraper website, would still be recognised by the search engines. In rare cases, if a bigger site with more authority than yours scrapes your content ( I mean complete scraping of the entire website content) you can always file a DMCA or speak to them in legal terms – however, I would suggest you speak to the site adminstrators first in general terms and request them to remove the content rather than getting into legalities.

Other Options

b) Add a link to your posts – Always try to add a link to your previous posts or other pages of the website in your content. This way even if some website scrapes your content the link als gets copied and hus it is easier to identify who has copied the content.

c) Partial Feeds – Most website scrapers try to take advantage of XML feeds and leverage it to publish content. Creating partial feeds will discourage such scraper websites from using your content. However, this would be injustice to your genuine readers and feed subscribers – so think twice before implementing this.

d) Plug ins – If you are using WordPress , use the WP Copyrighter plugin that attaches a Copyright notice to your XML feeds. So in case someone copies your content, the copyright notice goes in as well.

e) Signature -You can also use a signature text on your feed with a link back to your blog and your signature. Any site that scrapes the content would also carry the signature text there by crediting your website for the content.

When it is good to get your content copied..

Yes, at times it might be beneficial to get your content copied. Think if just one of your article gets copied by an authority website and they provide a linkback to your site as the source ! Well you get a good link as well as tos of traffic .