How to deal with article thefts and content scrapers

Content thefts and scrapers are more menacing than spammers. Spammers steal bandwidth, link juice and precious time in dealing with them, but article thefts and scrapers rob you the “essence” of your hardwork.

How many times do the topics article theft and content scraping were discussed in various forum and blogs – I am not so sure but one thing I know of is that many bloggers fell victims from this unscrupulous individuals whose intentions are simply to cheat and earn some traffic and money at the expense of other people.

I have admitted several times here in my blog that putting my thoughts into writing is always a challenge as I am not gifted with such talent. However, no matter how flawed my articles are (construction, grammar, punctuation, etc.), I take pride for each content I publish because of the great amount of effort and time I spent just to come up with one.

I have seen some of my articles in many other websites and blogs, but mostly are just excerpts and these people are kind enough to put the link back to my site – which I find fair even if these guys hijack some traffic from my blog.

However, what’s very  disappointing is to see your article published “verbatim”, even the title is copied. Normally, I just don’t mind it at all – what can I do? Many of these people are from other countries there’s no way I can go after them.

But it’s different when you know the scraper and is a local blogger. It’s more than enough to ruin your day and easily lose your respect on the person. I would be grateful if you like my article despite of it’s “shortcomings”. A few changes to the title and a tiny link back to my site will be more than enough to “flatter” me, in case you want to publish it on your site.

So how to deal with these content thefts who are enjoying the traffic from your very own article?

1. Just ignore them.What’s the point of calling their attention? They knew right from the start that what they are doing is bad.

2. If you can’t ignore them, blog about them but as much as possible, don’t mention names and give them the chance to apologize for offending you so dearly.

3. If they ignore you, then you are free to do whatever means necessary to get back at them. I will not divulge here what those things are – just email me if you want to know.

Lastly, you may consider submitting their sites/blogs in my brand-new spam site submission based on a very crazy idea of getting back at spammers and scrapers. Check out www.spamdomains.org.

And yeah, I’m outraged and furious and mad! LOL…

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 2:06 am and is filed under Rants & Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.