Are sites stealing your blog posts?
It happens every single time I make a post. The robots start coming when the ping goes out and the article gathering sites take me with it. Most of the time it isn’t that big of a deal, and I end up with a linkback as well as a hit because they only post a teaser article. So they have to come to my site to read the entire thing.
What about those sites that post the entire article? Well there is something you can do about it to get people to still come to your site. Just so I don’t have to explain what deeplinking is I am going to refer you to John Chow’s site who wrote an article last week entitled The Importance of Deep Linking. The article explains how you should use deep linking and the benefits of doing so for a different purpose than this, but it does tell you what the concept it.
Now that you know about deep linking you can use it to your advantage with the news thief sites out there that like to post your entire article. Try to relate other posts on your blog in every single post in some way. The robots are reading your RSS feed and I am now going to link to an article that relates to that asking What is RSS? Simple link that has some relevance to this post. Normally I would have stated this towards the beginning of the article, but I wanted to use it down here as an example.
Now we have those people that really get upset when these kinds of sites steal their content. They shouldn’t be unless the sites are not linking back to them. It is still a link and it does bring some traffic. The link may not hold that much wieight, but it does give the reader a reason to come to your site still. Unless another blogger is trying to pawn the work off as their own and not providing a linkback, you should not be upset about this. This is a good thing for you. If you utilize the deep linking strategy from John Chow’s blog and think of it for this purpose you can really give yourself a way to ping the hell out of your blog and get extra linkbacks every time you post.
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Filed under: Blogging Tips and SEO by JMH
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This might interest you… try out http://www.copyscape.com , a free online software that scans the whole web for who is copying your work.
Thanks Mark. Interesting site. Looks like they are kind of cheap on what they let you see though. Not sure if it is really a service I would want to pay for. The links I got were common, but weren’t neccessarily anything that was copied from me. A few of my quotes show up on there as common, but that is stuff I quoted from news sources.
Like your posts. Found you on MyBlogLog. It seems like you have some good linking techniques. I added you as a contact and hope that is OK.
Thank you good sir. I am going to join your communities right now :D.
I have actually had this happen to me via a MySpace blog! I was able get the blog shut down! Don’t mess with me!!!!
lol…good to see you again sir. Been a while. I hear you got the info from Gary so I should be seeing more of you ;).
Yes I did, and yes you will!
I’m gonna have to designate one day a month to deep linking. I think it’s a really important habit to start to take advantage of the indexing Google is doing. You never know what people are going to search for!
yea i’m definitely going to start deep linking when i get more content up.
you can’t really stop your content from being scraped…
I couldn’t agree more guys. Most of them only do a teaser anyways so i have no issue with it whatsoever. Utilizing the deep linking just gives people a reason to go to your site if it is shown in full.
All the sites get stolen from. I got almost 100 links from sites that stole the article from TechCrunch that linked to me. 5 pages in Technorati or more just from that one link there. Brought me traffic from them all too.
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Thanks for the comment :).
JMH,
Nice article — I recently found some of my work on another website. They did provide a linkback, but I was somewhat chapped because it was a complete MFA site — there was nothing on there but Google Blogsearch results and AdSense. I got over it though (like you said, at least you get a link out of it) and didn’t end up reporting him to Google.
Mind me asking which WP plugin you use to get the related posts at the bottom of your entries? Thanks!