SEO Tycoon

**VirtuosiMedia** · 09-24-2009, 12:02 PM

I've noticed that a recent article of mine was copied verbatim by someone else on a posterous blog and they didn't give any credit. What's more, they're hotlinking my images as well. Now, I could report them to posterous and I could also prevent the hotlinking...but, the page does have a link back to my site and their copied page doesn't show up in the first page of Google even when I specifically search for the title.

While this is only one instance of being copied, I could easily imagine it happening more, especially as I write more content. So my question to you is, is it worth trying to shut down scrapers, or should I just move on and make sure I have a lot of self-referencing links to my site in each post?

**vangogh** · 09-24-2009, 10:21 PM

The hard part about trying to shut down the scraper site is it's likely in a different country and the effort you spend trying to get the content removed is probably more than it's worth.

What I do is make sure that every post I write links to other posts on my site with an absolute URL. That makes it easy for search engines to figure out which is the original and you shouldn't have any duplicate content issues. It also gets you some free low quality links. My guess is the image that's being hotlinked is one where you used an absolute URL in the src. Most of the auto scrapers don't take the time to change your code. They just steal it.

Odds are it's not going to eat your bandwidth, but you can always prevent the hotlinking. A quick search will show you how. One thing you can do is set up a replacement image which says something like "If you're seeing this image then this site has stolen my content" or something like that.

The scraping sucks, but in the end it's not really that big of a deal. Do make sure to link back to your site with absolute URLs and you shouldn't see a problem. In the end it's a sign that your site is getting out there more and being found. With sites I've built I've almost always noticed that first the spammers find it and then it starts ranking. I now take the spam as a good sign of things to come.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 09-24-2009, 10:47 PM

Thanks, Steven. I'm not too worried about it. What you wrote was along the lines of what I was thinking as well. I was incredibly flattered earlier this week because someone actually took the time to translate my IE6 article into French. It was a real translation, too, not just one from Google's translation service. I thought that was kind of cool. It's funny how it's similar to scraping in a way, but I feel so much different about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

I now take the spam as a good sign of things to come.

I'm definitely on my way, then.

**vangogh** · 09-25-2009, 03:59 AM

Glad to reinforce what you were thinking.

A couple of years ago I caught someone stealing my content while he was stealing it. I had a link and wanted to see who was linking to me and checked the site and watched as one after another of my posts was copied and published. Naturally no contact info on the site so I called the web host who refused to do anything and said the site in question wasn't doing anything wrong.

I realized at that point it would be more trouble than it was worth to fight it. Truth is that other site would be banned from search engines soon enough.

Now I make sure to add the links to my other posts to at least get something back no matter how small and to let search engines know where the content is from. The hotlinking can be annoying, but for the most part I haven't done anything about it. There is a site or two out there who I do let republish some of my content and I know they hotlink to my images as well. I didn't want to block them and I didn't want to get too complicated with who I did block.

I've come to the inevitable conclusion that anything you put on line is probably going to get stolen by someone. Almost none of it really affects you other than that flash of anger you get when it happens.

It's amazing how quickly my site gets scraped too. All I have to do is use the right word in the post title and within a minute of posting the content is on another site. At least lately it's only been the first sentence or two with the link back to me.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 09-25-2009, 11:50 AM

So to turn it around...considering that getting scraped does get you a backlink, is there a way to increase the chances of getting scraped more often or by more people? I more or less understand how the process works, but I wonder if anyone has a list of commonly scraped keywords or some sort of list of directories or bookmarking sites whose entries are regularly scraped.

**top100** · 09-25-2009, 12:00 PM

Interesting thought VirtuosiMedia. How could we turn this around and get backlinks out of it? We could try to put links to ourselves in the content, which if copied and published elsewhere would be a backlink. But they could either remove it before publishing, or publish it to sites that are of ill repute, and thus we don't want a backlink from. So it could backfire in several ways I suppose.

**vangogh** · 09-28-2009, 07:59 PM

I never really thought about it. Seems the more popular your blog the more it will get scraped so you probably don't need to do much more than you normally would to market your blog. The scraped backlinks are going to be very low quality and many won't be there long. I'm not sure how much effort I'd put into specifically trying to get more.