I am by no means and expert on the subject but over the last couple months I’ve learned a lot about feed scrapers and content theft. It’s an insidious problem that just seems to get worse. Mr. Brownthumb recently invited me to do a guest post on his blog GardenBloggers (a great place for garden bloggers to get blogging tips) about my feed scraping experiences and you can find it here: Feed Scrapers.
And just to update you on the feed scraping of this blog I’ve tackled two and had my blog removed but have since learned of two more. Thanks to good blogging neighbors, like Gail!
Gack, Dave, this is so scary to Luddites like us who don't have a clue about how to deal with content stealing. It's all we can do to post the content to begin with. Aaarrrgghhh!!!!
Sigh, I've had some of my posts scraped as well but haven't gotten around to trying to fix it yet. So thanks for the reminder. I need to take care of this now!
I am glad you have had some success with the recent scrapper ~~it's all quite perplexing and irritating~~gail
PS Thanks for the shout out! I got so re-irritated that I forgot to thank you for the link;-) gail
OFB,
It's very frustrating! I would love to see an organization that targets content theft and helps people fix it easily.
Jean,
Go get em! The more people target these folks the more frustrated they will become, maybe oneday they will just quit!
Gail,
Sorry to get you riled up! I haven't really done much on the one you mentioned to me but there's actually two by that same company that are using my blog. I need to send another email out.
The thing about scrapers – Unless something has changed recently – in the long run they don't really hurt you very much if at all, and they don't really help their selves much either. Almost no one will link to a scraper and no one will subscribe to their feeds either. If you google for your targeted keywords you will usually see that you out rank them in search results. If you have your blog set up right the search engines know who is the originator of content, and you will get credit.
I don't think they are worth worrying about.
David,
Your opinion is echoed in many places and is definitely valid. I mostly agree that feed scrapers aren't going to significantly hurt bloggers and Matt Cutts (Google guy) agrees with you too. It still doesn't change the ethical portion of what their are doing. It's wrong to steal posts that someone else has written for profit of any kind. Most of those places claim they are doing bloggers a service but really their goal is to profit in some way. There are some out there who scrape content and remove any reference and all links to blogs. My concern isn't necessarily with search results as it is with the moral argument of stealing someone else's material.
Dave,
Forgive me for being so late with my gratitude for agreeing to do the guest post on Garden Bloggers. I really appreciate you taking the time to do it. If anyone else in the garden blogging community would like to contribute to the blog, feel free to contact me.