I just checked my akismet spam box because I was reading about how to prevent spammers from automatically posting comments and such.  I have had Akismet installed since the beginning of this blog so I always assumed it was catching the true spam.  What I didn’t realize is that in that spam are also trackbacks from content scrapers.

John Chow talked about this a while ago and I had forgotten about it until now.

In case you are wondering, a content scraper is someone whom, without permissions copies in whole or in part your blog posts and puts them on their own blog.  This is worse than just aggregating a feed because feed aggregate is only the link to the original article.  Pulling even part of the article itself and publishing without permission is just stealing.  Even though the link back to my site is there, the ramifications of this should be obvious.

Rankings 

First off, duplicate content is a big nono in blogging.  The problem is, search engines can’t tell the difference between the original and the copy, all they know is that the content is the same.  Guess what happens to that content in terms of search results and SEO?  That’s right, it gets thrown into the supplemental pile…in other words, the Google trash bin.

Essentially, Google then ignores those posts entirely and they don’t become part of the normal search returns.

Profits

Now, this may not seem like a big deal but the thing is, assume for a minute those scrapers or content thieves did manage to rank for those articles.  A user first goes to that site…possibly reads some of the article but may not click to the full (and real) article and instead stays on this scraper site.  Then they potentially click some ads or purchase some other product from that site.  Now you can see the problem.  My business is then suffering because of the unauthorized content.

Solution

So how do we solve this?

A simple cease and desist letter to the hosting companies should clear the matter up.  I hope.  Should that not suffice, I will have to pull out the big guns and sic some lawyers on these copyright tramplers.  I’m running a business here, not a charity. Ironically, this article is likely to be scraped and displayed on a few other blogs.  There were at least 3 I found in my spam that were stealing my content.  Nobody steals from me and gets away with it! >:)

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