This is an article about something that really bugs me. It’s known as “scraping” and it means that people out there who are too lazy or too dumb to write their own content for their websites, decide to steal it from your blog. From what I understand, it’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when it will happen.

I’ve been finding a few example of my own blog articles appearing in other people’s blogs, and thought I’d share them with you so you can see what this practice looks like.

I have an article about YellowPages.com Click Fraud, written by one of my clients. Here’s a screenshot of a website that “scraped” the content from that article, and put it there. You can click to enlarge it.

You can clearly see they’ve changed the title to “Google Alert - PPC Advertising” but they my original title is displayed as well as the first few lines of content.

Why would someone do this? Well, notice the little green underlined links? Put your mouse over the word “business” for example…look what happens:

Look at that…it’s a pop-up window with an advertisement for Business Chat Software. Isn’t that clever.

Still confused? Websites need content. Some folks decide that rather than writing their own content, they’ll steal it from other places and use the content to attract search engines and hopefully visitors that will click on the link and follow the pop-up ad. See how it says “Your Ad Here”?

So you ask, what can be done to stop this? I found this very lengthy and detailed article called “What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Content“. It contains some really excellent suggestions. I must confess though, I haven’t tried them yet. As my own blog has grown in popularity, I’m finding more and more examples of scraping and stolen content.

On the one hand it just infuriates me. On the other hand, it’s probably just a sign of the times and technology - and I’ve certainly read articles that say to simply ignore it. For the time being, I’m trying to ignore it, but it sure isn’t easy.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 7:31 am and is filed under the Blogs category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.