War against content slammers

Spamming and content stealing without any consideration for the author is what bothers me these days. And let’s say you can deal with spammers by banning them, using different Plugins, etc.

But what can you do when facing content stealers, and worse, content slammers. But first, what’s the difference between them? Content stealers simply scrap your RSS feed and display all your content on their sites, in most cases without giving any kind of link-backs. That is translated in duplicate content and worse positions for your articles in Search Engines.

Content slammers are a smarter version of stealers. They also scrap RSS feeds but pass the content trough a script which uses different algorithms to rewrite it. The results won’t be quite intelligibly from the semantic point of view, but if the algorithm used is smart enough, they  will have a better keyword density and will appear to be unique.

So, how can we deal with these punks? You need to be able to find them first. Cause since they don’t provide any link-backs to you, lots of blogs might steal your content without you even knowing it. Here’s what you should do to detect the stealers:

• use this site: Copyscape
• use digital printing for your feed. Read more about it in this post from Blog Herald.
• use track-back monitoring

And after you managed to find the guys stealing your content, you should try any of the following approaches:

• first, contact the owner of the site and ask him nicely not to steal your content anymore. In 99% of the cases the site won’t have a contact option though.
• then, use a whois service to find out the contact details and still try to convince them to stop.
• if the above ones fail, it’s time to take some drastic measures
  • report the site to Google. Here’s how.
  • find out what the host of the stealer is and file a DMCA notice with them.
  • file complaints to all the Advertisers he is using and try to get him banned.
  • then wait.
  • also read this article for more advices.

In most cases your site won’t be affected by content stealers and slammers on the long time, but SE positions might be affected for the copied articles. And if your site depends on Search Engines for traffic (which is not good…), you might suffer traffic decrease.

Tags: content stealer, RSS, scr