How long does it take for you to write a quality article? Let’s assume an hour. And let’s just say over the course of a year, you post 100 of these articles on your site. How would you feel if you stumbled upon another site one day with each and every one of those articles. That’s 100 hours of work that someone didn’t have to do because you did it for them! Would that make you want to hunt them down and … well, use your imagination for the rest.
When you pour all your hard work into writing fresh content for your site and someone copies your article, literally word by word, and makes the same post on their site without ever giving you credit for it, that’s called scraping (aka web scraping or blog scraping).
Blog scrapers are new media thieves who are simply looking to benefit from your energy with no intention of ever letting you know about it. Some scrapers do this manually while others use software tools to “harvest” or “extract” the data. Regardless, what they are doing is stealing from you.
Other than accidentally finding your article posted somewhere or having one of your visitors inform you, there are ways to do your own detective work.
There are, of course, many tools that you could use. From Google Webmaster Tools and Google Blog Search to Yahoo SiteExplorer and Technorati, there seems to be an abundance of sites out there that can show you link data. However, I found the easiest way is to simply Google search your own articles. Here’s how I manually do it:
- Copy a paragraph of your article.
- Paste the text into a google search box.
- Place quotes before and after it.
- See the results.
I know, there’s no rocket science involved in that approach but it works! It’s the KISS method but why complicate things? You might get the occasional scrape that slips through the cracks but you save yourself a lot of time and energy. Just by searching your own articles as I described once every month will inform you if scrapers are stealing every single article from you.
What happens if you actually find one of these thieves? In my next article, I’ll tell you what I have personally done as well as recommended for others to do when we find a web scraper.
Have you found anyone scraping your work before?