Clever Trick For Scraped Content
Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 5:36 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer
Every now and then I go out to the web and search on one of the article titles that I have posted in my blogs, or some keywords from the content.
Sometimes, what I find is very interesting, and not at all acceptable - It’s scraped content!
There are a few software programs (and individuals) out there that go out and scrape (copy entirely) a complete page of content from your site to theirs. This is the biggest form of spam of them all – worse even than mass posting to blog or forum comment areas.
Currently, the most popular way to scrape content is by using other people’s RSS feeds. The spammers just get ahold of a feed and copy away.
Unfortunately, this is the way of the Internet today. And tracking down these spammers and trying to get them to stop may or may not lead to success - mostly it will probably be a waste of time.
So, what can you do?
Heres one simple and ingenious way to use this practice to your advantage (I learned it at the Affiliate Summit from one of the top marketers):
Put your Affiliate Links and Ads into your RSS Feed!
Make sure to put links back to your site and maybe an ad or two in the first paragraph of your posts. That way, if someone scrapes your content, at least their visitors will lead back to you.
And, they will likely stop using your content as soon as they discover what you’re doing. The really don’t want to help anyone else!
So, you’ve basically killed two birds with one stone. You have a few more linkbacks to your site, and hopefully you’ve gotten rid of the scraper.
I think it’s definitely worth a try.
Trackback
Permalink
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
You are absolutely right Evelyn. If you try to prevent them, you just give yourself a full-time job trying to keep up every time they break your security measures and, likely this makes things inconvenient for your genuine readers.
This way takes so much less effort to be so much more effective.