Is content stealing on the increase?
A week or so ago I posted about my experience with paid reviews. In the post I talked about how much traffic John Chow sent me when I got Blogging Tips reviewed there, I called this traffic jump ‘The John Chow Effect’. I think John liked the term as he posted about it a few days later detailing how websites who have been reviewed on John Chow have received similar traffic jumps.
Whilst checking some back links on Technorati a few days ago I came across this page. This website had completely ripped off Johns ‘John Chow Effect’ post and posted it on their website as their own. I then noticed that the whole site is just a complete rip off of John Chow’s blog, the guy must be using a script which rips off content from a feed and posts it on a database. I emailed John to tell him about this as it isn’t good to have duplicate content on the web.
Little did I know Blogging Tips would be struck next, yesterday I came across this page…they’ve ripped off my ‘How to install wordpress post‘. Those cheeky monkeys! 
I do not want my content duplicated elsewhere on the web, particularly when the author is not even giving me credit for writing it. After seeing John Chow’s blog being completely ripped off and then seeing one of my posts copied too I’m a little worried that stealing content through RSS feeds could be becoming more popular. I have come across a script before that lets you display the latest content from rss feeds but never one which integrates with a blog so well ie. one which passes the content as their own.
How concerned do you think we should be about this? Have you had one of your posts completely ripped off before?
I am going to talk more about this soon and look into ways in which we can stop bloggers from ripping off our posts (eg. prevent hotlinking images etc) but for now, I’d love to hear your experiences with this.
Thanks guys,
Kevin
Andy Coates | July 19th, 2007 at 8:19 am #
I guess this is one of these things which would be impossible to police, I don’t mid people using extracts content from my site with a credit but ripping off whole articles is not on! In the long term these posts will probably end up just being a “flash in the pan” though it does beg the question how much search engine traffic to they rob when the results could bring up their page instead of the original!
Andy
Ram | July 19th, 2007 at 8:26 am #
Kevin, I have seen few things like this. Once my friend’s article was copied and then was given a link to the main url which was not click-able. Then I saw John COW’s blog post in a blog without linking to the blog. John COW wrote about this in his blog too. We should complaint it to the authorities who are in charge of handling this. And kevin, don’t worry. Hope you will get the content removed from that blog.
Success Online | July 19th, 2007 at 9:13 am #
I don’t like it. I think I have one site posting information that I create but it is referenced back to my site. I understand it’s not good to have duplicate content so I will be following up to have someone take a peek at it to see if it’s going to hurt me.
cooliojones | July 19th, 2007 at 9:43 am #
Kevin, I’m just seeing this post now, and I noticed that the blogger cited you as the source of his information. Did he do this when you initially saw it? How do you feel if people take the content but cite the original author?
John did a post about RSS feeds and ’scrapers’ and how to thwart them recently also. I bet you that the scrapers didn’t copy that!
Kevin | July 19th, 2007 at 9:49 am #
Coolio - I didn’t see any credit beforehand, infact I still cant!
Todd | July 19th, 2007 at 10:12 am #
It’s going to be hard to stop so why not use them to your benifit, put more links in your posts back to your own site, grab yourself some extra traffic
Kevin | July 19th, 2007 at 10:20 am #
Thats a fair point Todd. I link to older posts here on a regular basis anyways but maybe I should link even more!
Tara1 | July 19th, 2007 at 10:29 am #
I have had a couple of posts ripped off. I contacted the blog owners, one eventually removed it the other didn’t. Neither had given any link back to my blog.
I have also had a couple of my posts translated into different languages using my pics etc too, these posts did link back and I figured it may bring me more readers so let it go.
What is annoying me at the moment is I have found a design (supposed) blog that is litterally just taking the first para of loads of different design blog (I guess like the RSS script you mention) bold up keywords, and showing loads of google ads. The site is linking back to all the blogs but in effect is making money out of doing very little.
Empress | July 19th, 2007 at 10:45 am #
I think if you put anything on the Internet, and it’s good - or a popular niche. Odds are that someone is going to steal it because they’re looking for the “easy way out”. They don’t have to work on it - it’s just there.
The site also includes John’s buy me a beer link - which doesn’t seem to be changed… so more beer love for him.
Copying sucks - but I’m not really sure how much we can do to stop it. From the site, it appears that whoever it is has been able to remove the copyright content that was in John’s RSS feed - maybe a legal threat might be in order.
I’m not sure there’s a way to stop it.
Matt Van Stone | July 19th, 2007 at 10:47 am #
I dont know of anyone stealing my content, but Eric from Make Easy Money with Adsense had this problem so he added the following paragraph to the end of all of his posts:
“Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.”
This paragraph includes 3 links back to his blogs. So if an automatic scraper pulls your content, it is also going to pull this little author paragraph. It would probably be easy enough to script it out, but it’s just one small simple way of protecting your content.
B. Durant | July 19th, 2007 at 10:52 am #
John Chow actually addressed just this issue the other day when he talked about scraping the scrapers. I can tell you this being new to blogging I’m amazed at how similar if not exacting stories are across different blogs.
TechZilo | July 19th, 2007 at 10:57 am #
Duplicate content is a big problem…
You could contact the host(find host using whoishostingthis.com) and ask them to take down the site.
But of course, that may not work always.
The only hope is that your blog is crawled before the dup, so that they’ll be the duplicate
Kevin | July 19th, 2007 at 11:07 am #
B. Durant - I wasn’t aware that John wrote that post until someone mentioned it here. As i said, I emailed John about the guy ripping off his site but I dont know if my email made him think about the topic or not. John’s blog is very popular so I’m sure that a few other people emailed him about it.
I do try and cover certain topics which aren’t being covered on other blogs but since we are blogging about the same topic (eg blogging), it’s inevtiable that sites like this will cover similar topics from time to time.
B. Durant | July 19th, 2007 at 11:12 am #
Kevin - Sorry if it came across wrong. I wasn’t accusing you of ripping of Chow’s idea. Simply noting that there must be a problem with content theft as people, “big” people such as yourself and Chow are starting to take notice of it.
Kevin | July 19th, 2007 at 11:16 am #
No it’s fine, I didnt think you meant that
The reason I decided to talk about this was because I saw that guy rip off John Chow’s blog, when I later saw someone do it to me as well I wrote the post.
…but im glad you think as me as ‘big’ hehe
Tejvan Net Writing | July 19th, 2007 at 12:54 pm #
Yes, it happened to one of my mortgage blog, every article gets copied by a professional scraper. The irritating thing is I have to delete trackbacks and of course there’s no contact info on scraper. I also see the scraper being listed in google blog search so google still have some work to stop scrapers
Sly | July 19th, 2007 at 1:21 pm #
It hasn’t really happened to me yet, but I surely see other blogs stealing content from others without giving them credit or linking back. Like everyone else says, this is a big problem that shouldn’t be happening.
Chris Stark | July 19th, 2007 at 3:58 pm #
I don’t think there is really anything to worry about Kevin, or really protect against. Unfortunately, people can rip you off and as long as they give you credit, they are the same as journalists citing a source…
The best thing to do is use it to your advantage. If you know your posts are consistently being ripped off, add additions to your articles in your RSS feed that include affiliate links that will get you paid for clicks…
Also, anyone who rips you off, go to ping o matic and submit the page with your link on it to make sure Google gets to parsing the page. That way you at least get the backlink credit for your links…
affzan | July 19th, 2007 at 4:29 pm #
Is there anything at all that we can do to punish and banish these types of people from the surface of the earth?
It’s quite annoying seeing all those scrapers doing their dirty works. Surely, there must be something that we can do
Chris Stark | July 19th, 2007 at 6:41 pm #
The only thing you can do is go after them for copyright infringement, since the content is yours and they are using it without your permission. It’s much easier to turn it to your advantage, and much less costly…
Jack | July 20th, 2007 at 12:18 am #
Bummer. Same thing happened to me a last month while searching down backlinks to my posts.
What can be done? Not much except deal with the feeling of being violated.
Yes, the Google Dupe Content may come and get your blog post entries and possibly your URL - so cross your mouse and hope it does not happen.
Another idea is to link directly to the post in question from your title page as soon as you find the swiper. If your PR is higher you might be able to drop his site all together.
Mani Karthik | July 20th, 2007 at 1:27 am #
Great post there Kev(Damn - check out the comments!)
There is no stopping the copy cats - in fact i did a research on these copy scripts and results were alarming.
But, there is nothing to worry. Google knows well to take down these guys. G - crawls the web you see, it knows who came first and who copied. So unless he is on the top(in the SERPs), take it cool.
And as Todd said - Link to your site in ever post.I don’t think there is a script yet that will filter out links to the owner site(hope those guys don’t read this comment.)
Cheers!
Mani
Community Building Blog | July 20th, 2007 at 6:23 am #
What John seemed to keep quiet about was that the ‘John Chow’ effect generated a nice spike in traffic, but it soon went back to normal within a day or two.
I would question the value of such short-term temporary traffic spikes - although measuring the benefits in brand awareness and getting your name out there is much harder to do.
- Martin Reed
Kevin | July 20th, 2007 at 6:53 am #
That is always going to happen though CBB. What you need to do is try and make sure you have good content and a nice site so that all those new people want to come back themselves. It should be remembered my rss feed went up 200 or so after the John Chow review
pbradish | July 20th, 2007 at 10:20 am #
I agree. If you have quality, targeted content that relates to the visitor, chances are that they will be back.
Baz L | July 20th, 2007 at 10:27 pm #
Yep, happens to the best of us. I’ve had (and still do) have entire posts straight from my feed blatantly ripped off.
I’ve also had an experience with a guy posting things straight out from a mailing list. I supposed he registered to the forum with an email address and has then set up wordpress to post all incoming emails to that address. Every single message passed back and forth in the mailing list ends up on his blog.
One major problem with what this guy is doing is that he’s publishing people’s email addresses. Although the group can be searched through Google Groups, Google has the good scene to hide email address.
I’ve reported a few blogs to Blogger and was disappointed with the results. I got an email back from them saying that I need to send something in writing and I have to swear under penalty of perjury that the person is violating some agreement. Oh, did I mention that I have to go read blogger’s terms and conditions and state which sections the person was violating?
I don’t get how someone can use 3 of Google’s services (Google Groups, Blogger, Adsense) and blatantly violate policies on ALL of them and I’m the one that has to go do footwork.
–
Baz L
Day In The Life of Baz
http://www.LifeOfBaz.com
Tyler | July 27th, 2007 at 10:19 am #
All of my blogs get scraped and republished via RSS, and as long as they don’t remove the links I put in the posts, I have no problem with it (it’s easy, free backlinks). Since they aren’t stripping your links out, I wouldn’t worry about it all.
Teli Adlam | November 3rd, 2007 at 5:41 pm #
To answer the question posed in your title, yes. Especially considering that I found my way to this post by following the content posted on a Blogger blog which, not surprisingly, has the title of Is content stealing on the increase?
I only found out about the blog because I saw a link in Technorati which features one of my exact post titles. Upon checking it out, they had ripped my blog entry, links and all, slapped their own advert links in (along with interim ads if you click on a post permalink from the blog home/archive page) and didn’t even offer me credit. I have a sneaking suspicion that their entire blog is ripped off content.
Funny thing is, I don’t even offer a full text feed, so they must be using some other sort of scraper software that pulls the actual HTML off the blog and posts it to their blog.
In any event, I thought you could do with a head’s up that your content has found itself on yet another unscrupulous blogger’s website.
~ Teli