I’ve recently noticed that there is a website which collects my posts through RSS feeds and makes an almost complete copy of my blog (a typical scraper):
Not only does it contain the full text and pictures, but also the videos from the posts. Today I emailed them and asked that my posts be removed from their domain. This is how they replied:
I replied with this:
Then he said this:
And finally I replied with this:
He hasn’t replied after this. And something tells me that my content won’t be removed from that website.
Does anybody know whether what that guy wrote about private RSS feed is actually correct? My gut feeling is that it’s just bullshit. Why would I have to change anything on my blog in order to avoid being scraped by some scraping site?
What are my options if he doesn’t remove my content from his site? Is it possible to file a DMCA notice against such a website considering the fact that my blog contains the textual descriptions which are mine, although the pictures and preview videos are usually not my own?
I think the question to ask is how it affects your site, do you think his pages will score in Google better than your own? Google is pretty good at knowing the original source of content and hiding the duplicate.
As Mr Magoo said, it’s a tricky situation. You’re publishing a feed which is open to the public and
DMCA and legal threats might have quite limited effect.
If he’s hotlinking to your images you could block that though which might make your feed less interesting for him to use. I do that on my site as it’s been scrapped by others quite a few times.
Well, sometime ago Google classified certain keyword combinations to be treated as non-porn, even if there are porn website domains which contain such keywords. So for instance, if you search for my blog by entering these three words (with spaces): rough straight men, you will not get my blog as the first result (which used to be the case until a few months ago). Instead, you will get that scraper blog with my posts.
Similarly, “New York straight men” also doesn’t give that site as the first result, but instead Google gives some mainstream shopping sites which contains those keywords.
In my opinion, if Google hadn’t censored these type of keywords, my site would have still ranked as the first result, but now you get that scraper site instead as the first result.
I’m not a great SEO expert, but I think it’s not very wise to let scraper sites publish your content on the basis of your RSS feed. I don’t think that they link to my blog at all, although my affiliate linking codes on the pictires still seem intact and properly redirect to the sites I promote.
I looked at that scraper site a bit more and it seems that the situation is not as bad as I first thought. They only have a few months worth of my posts, not the entire blog.
Could you please explain how to do that? How to block images from being hotlinked from RSS feed?
By the way, is feedburner still operational, and does it still make sense to make your RSS feed go through it?
I dont know if your on Wordpress, or for that matter if you need your “full feeds” open but there is an option in wordpress to restrict feeds to just featured image, title and excerpt. That way people can still subscribe to your feeds (not that I am sure much traffic is in feeds these days) but it will just link to your article rather than display the whole thing.
Almost every SEO plugin/pro suggests doing excerpt feeds these days for this very reason of scrapers.
With regards to getting the content removed from the offending site, its harder, but you can get those results removed from google by completing the following form, the other webmaster will also get a “strike” in his webmaster tools and get a warning to remove the content, so it might be worth trying… Report content on Google
Hot linking is a bit complicated to setup and probably would have to be done by your host. There are downsides though as it can affect a lot of things that you might not expect.
I think Daniels recommendations is the best and easiest solution for you.