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Content scraping is a common problem among bloggers and website owners. Fight back against content scraping with some effective techniques. Most, if not all, bloggers deal with having their content stolen from one time or another. Content scrapers come in, steal your content from your blog or website, claim the content as their own, and often the true author has no way of proving it. Unfortunately, in many cases, Google is unable to identify the original author of the content. Trying to take back the rights to the content can be a nightmare in some cases, as well. You are able to claim your content back from one scraper and it seems a handful more pop up overnight. This is why it is a better idea to learn how to prevent your website from being scraped online and safeguard your content in the first place rather than wait for it to be stolen and then trying to claim it back. How Scraping Works? Half the problem with content scraping is that an author will have a scraper bot pick up their content, publish it to another site without attribution and then Google indexes it giving it first page rank. Your content can be stolen in many ways, however below are a couple common ways: Your images and text are copied and re-published on a spammer's blog. Your RSS feed is scraped which is one form of plagiarism that is very hard to combat. Checking is Necessary First, you need to check to determine if your content is being stolen. There are rules set by Google against scraping or content copying, however, you should definitely take the matter in your own hands and check to see if your content is being used elsewhere. There are several webmaster tools available to you to do this. A couple of popular tools are Copyscape and Google Alerts. If you do find that someone has scraped your content, you can begin the process of asking them to remove it. To save yourself from this process of checking for duplicacy, you may directly block the malicious bots that are responsible for content copying. Ways to Prevent Content Theft Captcha. In many cases, content is scraped by a computer, and not by a person. Having a captcha filter will help to significantly reduce the scraping of your content, as well as the amount of spam that ends up on your site. A captcha filter is a small box that requires a person to type in a few numbers and letters. This technique ensures it is a person and not a bot on your site. 1. Canonical Links. A good technique you can try is placing the rel="canonical" tag on your site so you get the credit for any content that is scraped from your site. This will not help to stop scrapers, but it will ensure you are getting the credit you deserve. The site scraping your content can end up penalized since Google can see this tag. 2. Disable Text Selection. This is a very effective technique for eliminating direct content copying. If you own a blog, you can disable text selection from your blog. All you need to do is install a little JavaScript code on your blog right before the tag within the HTML section of your blog. There are a number of WordPress plugins for this for people who store their content on WordPress blogs. 3. Add Watermarks to Your Images. Make sure to watermark all your images you have on your blog or website. This shows you hold the copyright to the images. Not to mention, many content thieves avoid images that have been watermarked since they hold your name on them. For more advanced protection you may for specialized data scraping protection services like Scrapesentry. When you are looking for ways of how to prevent data from scraping, one thing to keep in mind is content scraping is not always a bad thing. If the person copying your content is giving you credit, you can benefit by the additional traffic you will receive to your website or blog which helps you gain more visibility. Your website will be in front of a whole new audience and this new crowd might just be interested in your content enough to make them come over to your website or blog to get more information. In many instances, business relationships and proposals may be made that center on the republishing of content. However, this only works when the proper credit is given as no author wants to see their content out there with another person's name on it.
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