Semalt: Content Scrapers. How To Find Out Who Is Stealing Your Content

If you are a blogger or content writer, the chances are you know everything about content scrapers. Note that content scrapers can copy or steal your web content for their private blogs without any permission. Some of the content scrapers just copy and paste your blog posts all the time, while the others use automated programs to take content from the RSS feeds and publish it on their own websites. Here we will describe how to discover who is stealing your web content and what measures you should take against them.

How to find out that your site is being scraped:

Unless you don't search for your post title in Yahoo, Bing or Google, you cannot track down the websites that steal your content on a regular basis. If you are looking to know about those spammers or hackers, you may try any of the following ways.

1. Copyscape:

It is the easiest and simplest way to find out who is stealing your content on the internet. This program allows you to enter the URLs of your web content and find its copies on the World Wide Web. You can either use its free version with limited options or premium version that allows you check nearly 10,000 web pages for a few bucks.

2. Trackbacks:

You can also try the trackbacks of your WordPress site to identify and crack down the sites that steal your content almost daily. If you use Akismet, many of the trackbacks will be shown in your spam folder. The key to identifying and getting the trackback is to include links of your post with great anchor texts. Internal and external linking is important for your site optimization.

3. Webmaster Tools:

Another way to find content scrapers is by using Webmaster Tools. Go to the Web > Links of your Google Analytics account and click on the Linked Pages column. Any website that has been linking your posts will be displayed in this area. To find your own links on this site, you just have to click on the domain and find the details of which articles of your website have been stolen so far. Here you will be able to see how brilliantly they are copying and pasting your post titles and content on a daily basis.

4. Google Alerts:

If you have not been posting regularly and are looking to keep up with any mention of your blog posts or articles on other sites, you must create Google Alerts using the accurate match of your articles' titles by putting it in the quotation marks.

Get Credit for the Scraped Post:

If you have created a WordPress site, you should try an RSS footer plugin. It lets users place the custom pieces of your text at the bottom or top of the RSS feed content. And if you don't own a WordPress site, you should simply include the short description or note at the bottom or top of your content that it consists of the similar information and should be referenced properly.

How to Stop Content Scraping?

If you don't want anyone to steal or copy your web content, you have to take a few measures. First of all, you should contact the site administrator and ask him/her to take down the pages where your web content is copied. You can convince him/her to get those articles removed instantly.

If there are no ways to contact an administrator, you should do the Whois Lookup to discover who owns this website or domain name. If it was not registered privately, you would find the administrator's email address easily. Alternatively, you can contact GoDaddy or HostGator and bring it to their attention that the website or domain name in question is continuously stealing your web content and it should either be removed or suspended instantly.

Last but not the least, you can visit the DMCA. You must use its takedown service to get your copyrighted images, videos, blog posts and content removed. There are some WordPress plugins that incorporate the DMCA protected badges, and you can install it on your website to warn the potential hackers and thieves.