So you are happily blogging away and now you are finding your content is all over the internet. “Content scraping” can be problematic because:

  • Others are benefiting from publishing after all your hard work
  • You may experience fewer visits to your site, particularly if the scraped content ranks higher than your own
  • Your brand may be diluted because there is no attribution back to you

What You Can Do If Your Content is Stolen

  1. Contact the website owner/scraper and ask them to take your content down. If the scraper ignores you or refuses to take down your stolen content, you can file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint.
  2. Consider syndicating your RSS feeds as summaries and not the full posts. Check your WordPress configuration by going to
    Settings > Reading.
  3. Check out this resource to prevent hotlinking of images.
  4. Use Copyscape, which is a free plagiarism checker to find copies of your content online
  5. Set up Google Alerts to further track your content in the wild.

Have you had your content stolen? What other techniques did you use to stop the scraping?

Photo by thecrazyfilmgirl