How many times have you been in this trouble of someone copying your content. It really hurts when someone blindly does web scraping of your content and claim that it's theirs and also, worst thing is when they are ranked higher than you in the search results. There are multiple ways to find web scraping using various online tools. Web scraping has become a common problem for most of the publishers and it can be handled in multiple ways.
Once you know that your content has been scraped by these web scraping gurus and if you think that they are being ranked higher than your own website then Google can help you. Just fill up the 'Scraper Report' by Google and let them know that your content has been scraped. You need to include other details like - your content URL, exact URL on the scraper site, search result/ search input that demonstrates the problem and also you need to confirm that you are following web master guidelines and that you are not affected by Google's manual action. Once you submit, Google will definitely find who the real scraper is and investigate on this. Only after this, the scraped content will be penalized.
Also see: Why is it important to add Authorship to your Website
Here are few tips that you may try. These content scrapers use some automated tools to copy content which will blindly copy all the content, links and images from your original content. Some of the best ways would be to include your signature or website name or more like a watermark in your website images. Also, other way would be to leave internal links in between posts pointing to your own website. These automated tools might remove the hyperlink pointing to your site. You may try including or writing about your personal experience by including your name in between the post. The visitors of other website can now easily make out that the content was copied from else where.
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Web scraping is illegal and publishers can raise a DMCA complaint against those scrapers. Also, sometimes you as a publisher can take advantage of gaining some traffic. These visitors (on scraped website) will see your name or your website link in the images (watermark) and will visit your website. Give it a try and let me know what you think about content scrapers by leaving a comment.
Submit your request on 'Scraper Report' here: [Link]
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Thank you for posting this. I was not aware of the ‘Scraper Report’ by Google, but I am aware of people stealing photos and using them on their own website for their own gain; it happened to me. Having a watermark along the outer edge somewhere isn't good enough; they'll just crop it out. I ended up putting a watermark right down the center of every image on my website. It's a shame you have to practically destroy an image with a watermark so lazy people won't steal it.
ReplyDeleteSame is the case here.. we are forced to use watermark every wr..
ReplyDelete