These days there are lots of websites and blogs are the spammy sites or so called content scrapers, as they simply use auto-blogging or RSS fetching software robot to copy your original contents, including text, images and videos on your blog or website. And this results lots of duplicated contents over the Internet.
One of the worries of site owners is whether duplicate contents will affect your site ranking on search engines, especially Google or will you get penalized by Google that brings negative impact to your site’s position in search results.
Fortunately, the recent comments by Google’s Matt Cutts says that scrapped content even has positive impact as scrapped site will normally have a link back to the original site or blog which will bring positive impact. And Google is good enough to identify which site has the original contents. Watch the video below.
But if you’ve been experiencing your site content is being scraped by many other sites or blogs, you’d have noticed some of them do NOT provide a link back to your original blog post or site. But you can have a little trick in your blog post to have these scraped sites to always have a backlink to your site by using one of the following two methods.
1. Always have internal link back to your older blog posts, category or tag When composing a new blog post, always have a few backlinks to your old blog posts, category or tag of blog posts that are relevant. Content scrappers will normally just copy everything, so once you have internal backlinks to your old blog posts, categories and tags, the backlinks will also appear on copied blog post on the scraped site.
2. Modify you RSS feed to always have the blog permanent URL stay at the bottom of each blog post If you use Wordpress, you can do this by modifying the file wp-includes/feed-rss2.php. Find where <content:encoded>…..<content:encoded> is and add in your site’s signature and also a hyperlink back to your original blog post such as follows:
Written By <a href="http://smartborneo.com">SmartBorneo.com</a>, <a href="<?php the_permalink_rss() ?>"><?php the_title_rss() ?></a>]]></content:encoded>
After doing so, every new blog post will have the permanent link at the bottom on your RSS feed. And content scraper will normally extract your content from RSS feed and most of the time they will copy everything including the permanent link at the bottom of your blog post. But the downside is this method, a Wordpress upgrade will replace the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, which you’ll need to edit the file again and put in the above. Feel free to let me know here if you have some other better ways of doing it.
Tags: Google