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Woohoo – I’ve been Scraped! Now what?

Earlier today, I was reading at one of my favorite places… www.ShoeMoney.com. While I am nothing more than another anonymous visitor to Jeremy, his insight and thoughts will occasionally get me to not only think outside the box, but daydream about the possibilities of success!

Today, he wrote a piece about getting value out of scrapers. Until I read the post this afternoon, I had not even considered anyone would want to copy content from this site. Guess what… I was wrong! Scraping is the practice of copying content from one page and displaying it as your own… call it piracy, call it stealing, call it whatever you want, but ultimately it is just plain annoying. Now, don’t get me wrong… I am flattered that someone would find what I write useful and post it on their own site, but when that person copies and pastes the information like it was their own… well, that’s another story!

Once I read Jeremy’s post, I jumped back over to this site and immediately started searching for some of the text in a few of my posts.  Much to my surprise,  found one site within just a couple minutes! Now let me just say first… I can guarantee that 100% of the content I write here is mine. If I ever even used a reference to something else, I credit them. Being new to the world of scraping I really don’t know how to deal with it all… so I grabbed a wordpress plugin named rss footer from Joost De Valk’s site. Essentially, the plugin will embed a short snippet of code to every post and credit the author in the form of a “This post is from: The Niche Store Builder blog”.

Anyhow… here is one of the sites that snatched up a few of my articles, changed 2-3 words and claimed them as his own!

His Post: here Mine: here As you notice, he eliminated the first sentence and took the rest as his own. Why did he eliminate the first sentence? Well, when I started searching to see if there was scrapings around the web, if I had searched the first portion, I never would have found it.

There are others as well, in bits and pieces. I truthfully appreciate that someone finds what I write useful, I just wish he would credit the blog.

So… if you blog about what you are doing, make sure to check for dup content every now and again.

Mark

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About the Author, Mark Hansen

has written 573 article(s) at the Niche Store Builder site.

I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing. 

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5 Comments »

  • Julie Santee said:

    Mark, that is amazing that someone can just steal like that. I had read that same post over at Shoemoney. It’s one thing if someone reads someone’s content, looking to get ideas for their own content on a similar subject, but to COPY AND PASTE the entire thing without any qualm whatsoever? Unbelievable! I believe I’d email them and kindly ask them to come up with their own original content and to remove yours….after all, I don’t think he’d appreciate your readers showing up to publicly bash him for the thief that he is! hint hint

    Reply – Quote
    # 11 January 2008 at 8:08 pm
  • Graham said:

    Mark,

    I went to the copy site and left a comment – ‘Try writing your own articles instead of stealing other’s work ,etc’

    Everyone should do the same, maybe the site owner will then get the message loud and clear.

    Reply – Quote
    # 12 January 2008 at 6:33 am
  • Melissa said:

    Unfortunately, this is one of those annoying things I think everyone has to put up with. And it’s not limited to just sites with RSS feeds anymore. Basically, if you have a site, chances are good that your content is going to get scraped at some point. Some will even go so far as to completely duplicate your site – which REALLY gets under my skin.

    It’s flattering when someone feels your content is good enough to post on their site, but it’s another story when you don’t get the credit. I’ve had it happen to me so often that I don’t let it bother me too much anymore. Sure, I still get angry – I’m only human – but trying to fight them all would be a full-time job if I let it consume me.

    Like you, my content is original and if I do pull something from another site, I credit the source.

    The good news is that most of the scrapers usually always end up getting caught and their sites end up de-indexed. To that I say, Karma is a – well, I’ll let you fill in the blank :-)

    Thanks for the post to the plugin. I’m going to give that a try.

    Have a great weekend!

    Reply – Quote
    # 12 January 2008 at 10:15 am
  • MikeL said:

    Another thing to consider is Google penalizes duplicate content and can affect your Adsense pricing, so you need to protect yourself. How does Google know which content is original and which is copied?
    Does anyone know if that can apply to ezinearticle content even with proper attribution?
    copyscape.com is one way to see if your own content is copied by another site, or if your own site contains content from another.

    Reply – Quote
    # 29 January 2008 at 2:06 pm
  • Which is Better - Aggregated Content or Surfing for Content? | The Niche Store Builder - Succeed with Build a Niche Store said:

    [...] scraped and listed on another site, for profit. If you recall, several months ago, I found that my own stuff was being scraped and posted (which has since been removed) but I think there were some key differences between the two that [...]

    Reply – Quote
    # 31 August 2008 at 3:41 pm