Fight The Scrapers
When a blog gets somewhat popular and starts getting indexed by search engines, you will notice the content of the blog being scraped.
Scrapers use automated techniques to get my posts through my RSS feed and then display it on their blogs. Why? To get higher rankings with search engines. And they leave links back to your blog post which appears to you in the form of trackbacks. If you don’t delete these trackbacks then you are giving these bastards free traffic.
But not all trackbacks are bad. So make sure you delete only the spam and not genuine trackbacks from your friends.
Now I’ve decided to try and fight these scrapers with whatever tools are available to me. One of them is a copyright statement on all my feeds. Now since scrapers use automated tools they won’t check those blogs to remove my copyright statement manually. Thus the scraper blog will tell any human readers who really wrote the post. Sites like RLSLOG already use this technique.
I’m using a plugin called Feed Entry Header to automatically display this copyright statement but I’m not sure if it is perfectly compatible with FeedBurner. We’ll know when the feed entry for this post reaches feed readers.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
It’s annoying. Separate it neatly, no? Like a | character at the end atleast?
December 14th, 2007 at 12:49 am
At the end of the copyright statement and the link? That would look very odd. Suggest a better variation and I’ll use it.