Affiliate Programs

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It happens to the best of us.

Like it or not, there are few steps we can take to protect our content from scrapers.

I’ve spent a good amount of time fighting for my content when I find it on other sites. Many of these sites use RSS feeds to steal content. Yeah, there are a few things you can do, but is it really worth all the time and trouble it will cost you?

Here’s what you need to know.

If you post to your blog often, Mr. Googlebot will visit often. Googlebot visits my site at least once every other day. There are times it comes around every day. It loves fresh content!

Having said that, I do have a few blogs that I let slide without making post to them over a several week span. Googlebot slowed visits to these blogs, to a point where it was only visiting every other week or so.

What does this have to do with Scraped content?

You’ve probably heard about Google and the duplicate content penalty…right? Many people will tell you not to worry about stolen content because you published your article first.

Well, that may or MAY NOT be true. If you publish a blog post and it is indexed in Google first, then you generally have nothing to worry about.

However, if you do publish it first and Googlebot doesn’t visit you often and in the meantime your content is scraped and Googlebot visits the scraper site before it visits your site, guess who has the duplicate content then?

How I’m Dealing With Scraped Content

Honestly, I’m not worrying about it much.

What I am doing though is letting the scrapers help me.

What I’ve done with sites that are being scraped but not being visited often by Googlebot is that I’m putting a lot of links in the blog post.

Normally when your content is scraped, it’s being done automatically. The program sucks up all you content on the page including links and sometimes even photo’s. Now when your content is spit out on the scraper sites, there are links in the content pointing back to your site (if you put them in). There are a few scraper programs that strip out links, but from what I’m seeing, most don’t.

And…if you put your affiliate program links in your content, you now have some affiliate links on those sites as well.

But Aren’t All Scraper Sites Low Quality Sites That Don’t Make It Into Google’s Index?

Ahhh…I see you’ve been listening to Google lately. This is what Google would love for you to believe. But it’s not true.

If you Google often, how long has it been since you’ve come across a scraper site that was listed high in the rankings? I found several this morning while searching for some Sports news!

Okay, okay. So all these sites aren’t going to be PR 6 and PR 7’s listed at the top of the SERPS. That’s okay. However you will get a little link love from many of these scraper sites, especially if they’ve been around a while.

I’ve proven this technique with two sites that I knew were getting scraped.

Sure, I’d love it if we didn’t have to deal with these kinds of issues, but we do. So we might as well try and make the best of it when it happens. I don’t know about you, but I’m too busy to spend hours on end hunting down my scraped content and threatning the site owner.

As the old saying goes, shut down 1 scraper site and 10 more takes it place!