Don’t you just hate people who rip off your content, replicate your websites and do so without ever asking permission or worse still don’t even have the courtesy to link back to author? Well now there might just be a way to get your own back and use these spammy mofo’s to your advantage!
Recently I’ve been flooded with a new kind of spam here at Fish and Clicks. Similar to comment spam and track back spam these websites are simply auto generating their own blog websites by replicating the content of others, presumably by taking the contect straight from the rss feeds. An example can be seen blelow (for obvious reasons I haven’t hyperlinked to the actual blog)
My Original Post
The Spammer Post
A big thanks go out again to Joost de Valk for developing a WordPress plugin called RSS Footer (originally requested by Shoemoney). The plugin allows you to simply add an extra line of content to articles in your feed.
Why is this useful?
Well now I can automatically insert backlinks to this website along with optimised anchor tags so that anybody finding the stolen content knows exactly where it came from. It also means that the spammers and scrapers are getting hit with my own links and it might even help towards with my own SEO. Nice!
I’m wondering though if having links on spammy websites if there’s any negative effects or association that might rub off. Perhaps some kind SEO guru out there can let me know?
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I’m far from being a guru but this doesn’t sound a good idea. Surely Google et al will associate your site with the spam site and thus slap you? Also, who gets penalised for the duplicate content, you or the duplicator .. or both?
@ Gadget
That was my initial thought too but there’s just too many SEO professionals either using this plugin or recommending it. That leads me to believe that it’s perfectly safe to do so without risking my own rankings.
Oh, and Matt Cutts from Google has just replied to Shoemoney about this very plugin also suggesting that this is a “smart” thing to do. That’s good enough for me :)
Cheers
Paul
Well if it’s good enough for Mr Cutts .. thanks for the post & reply.
You might be interested in this article which has a few more steps you can take against scraper sites. It mentions Joost’s plugin article also and some pretty positive comments on it from Matt Cutts.
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/20/fighting-scrapers-with-your-left-jab/
Paul – that is a great article.
I’ve installed several of Joost’s plugins – including RSS Footer – and whilst still a new site, I rank well on Google and still haven’t been scrapped .. famous last words though eh?