I’ve noticed in the last few days that there are people out there scraping content from my site, or at the least, borrowing articles for use on their own sites. I actually only found this out when I saw trackbacks listed in my WordPress dashboard. I’m not sure how I feel about this, or, really, how I should feel about this.
I found two sites that have posted my articles. These two were attributed to me, hence the trackback, but still, I wasn’t asked before the content was borrowed (or stolen if that word is more applicable). That part does bother me a bit.
I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do or anything I should do about this. I know I’m certainly not the only one to have this happen. There are many bloggers out there who have content ripped off from them wholesale. So, I’ll pose this question to my readers: What do you think about content scraping and what do you think I should do?
I would first send an email to them and ask them to remove the articles. If that doesn’t help you can contact their hosting provider and ask them to contact the owner of the site. I have never experienced this but what I heard from other people contacting a hosting provider usually helps.
Anyway, good luck and let us know how it went.
I’m still trying to figure out if it’s such a bad thing because it actually might help my search engine rankings. That is, if there is a link back to my site. If they don’t link to my site, then they’re just totally ripping me off.
Yeah, you are right, if there is a backlink pointing to your website it can actually help you. Duplicate content could be an issue too.
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Hey man… just wondering: was one of these sites ‘freedownloadscenter.com’? Only I think they may have nicked one of my articles. I saw a review you had written posted there. http://blog.freedownloadscenter.com/2006/10/29/textwrangler-for-editing-text-on-a-mac/
Hi Tom. Thanks for the heads up, but I’m afraid this one’s a false alarm. I’m actually a paid contributor to that blog. I just started writing reviews for them in the past couple of weeks. It’s my first paid blogging gig, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet. I’d like to post about my experiences after I give it a little time, though.
As far as the content stealers go, I don’t want to reward them for ripping me off by sending them traffic. I found a couple of them so far, but I’ll bet there are more…