Slow Down the Content Scrapers with the FeedEntryHeader Plugin

Posted May 20, 2009 · Filed Under WP Plugins · 501 views · 5 Comments

webfraud You work hard on your content, and it’s really disheartening to see that someone else has stolen it and published it on their site. But, what can you do about it?

These lazy bloggers who steal content from other sites are called scrapers, and they most commonly get your content through your RSS feed and put it on SPAM blogs (called ’splogs’), usually in the hopes of earning income through AdSense installed on the splog.

So, what should you do? Can you stop them?

Most ’splogs’ don’t have contact information on them, so contacting the owner of the splog is usually an effort in futility. (However, if you catch your content on a site that does have contact information available, by all means – contact the blog owner and tell them to take your content down!)

Should you stop publishing a feed? No, that hurts your readers and subscribers who rely on your feed to bring them the information you publish. So, what then?

Use the FeedEntryHeader plugin to add a copyright notice at the top of your feed, along with a statement of where to find the original publisher of the content.

I just installed this plugin over the weekend, and here’s what my feed now looks like:

feedentryheadertextadded

Now, if any of my posts get picked up by one of these scrapers, at least this notice will go along with it, and it will be much more apparent to anyone reading that post that the content came from somewhere else.

Install and activate the FeedEntryHeader plugin on your blog and know that you’re doing your part to “out” the content scrapers of the world.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to the feed in your feed reader or via email.

Tags:

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

5205 Responses2009-05-20+12%3A30%3A41Suzanne to “Slow Down the Content Scrapers with the FeedEntryHeader Plugin”

Tom Volkar / Delightful Work
May 20th, 2009 9:30 am

Thanks Suzanne, I’ve just installed this one. It is well needed I’ve been scraped so much I feel raw. Any layer of protection is welcomed.

Do you know how to customized the copyright message?

Tom Volkar / Delightful Work´s last blog post..How To Extract Your Waiting Wisdom
Suzanne
May 20th, 2009 6:06 pm

You’re welcome, Tom! To customize the copyright message, login to your Dashboard, click FeedEntryHeader in your Settings menu. You’ll find instructions there.
Djuanna
May 20th, 2009 6:19 pm

Great info. I’m installing tonight!
Suzanne
May 20th, 2009 8:41 pm

That’s exactly what I thought when I came across it this weekend, Djuanna. I was like, “Oh yeah – let me HURRY UP and install this baby!”
Don
May 25th, 2009 10:22 am

Looks very useful indeed. I actually use the rss footer plugin for the same purpose. Though likw spammers scrapers ARE very annoying.

Don´s last blog post..Windshield Replacement Cost