Comments on: Protect yourself from content theft

By: NaijaEcash

NaijaEcash — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:42:23 +0000

The door to a house may not prevent a determined armed burglar from breaking in, but it can discourage a petty thief from sneaking in unnoticed.
This effort is better than doing nothing. Thanks for sharing the tip.

By: Collin LaHay

Collin LaHay — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:33:02 +0000

There is no permanent answer, as the spammers will always be here. We only try to make the best of a crummy situation.

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:15:12 +0000

The problem is that many spam bloggers will strip away any and all HTML in the post. This prevents you from linking to your own content and serves the spammers by letting them concentrate their pagerank on the sites they want to promote.

One suggestion to defeat this has been to have the URL also serve as the anchor text, but the search engine benefit of that is debatable.

I’m all for making the best of a bad situation, but spammers are already putting the brakes on this strategy. The kind of full post, full HTML scraping that this addresses is becoming more and more rare.

What is clear is that our enemy is a cunning one, able to change forms and tactics at the whim of wind.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:19:22 +0000

Done. Thanks for the heads up.

By: Stephen Cronin

Stephen Cronin — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:02:50 +0000

I have a WordPress plugin that does this too, called FeedEntryHeader.

FeedEntryHeader allows you to add a copyright statement (and a link to the original article) to the TOP of your feed entries. There are quite a few plugins that add it to the BOTTOM of the post. My argument is that the bottom of the post is too late. The reader is more likely to take action if they see the copyright statement at the beginning of the page, along with a link to the original article. The hope is that they’ll switch to your site to read the original post.

The message is fully customisable. By default it includes a brief copyright statement and a link to the original post (not just the home page).

One problem with adding links to the feed is that many scrapers remove the link. Therefore, I’ve made the default anchor text the URL, so that if the splog strips your link, at least the URL remains as text.

Anyway, I thought this may be of use to your readers…

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:42:12 +0000

Looks like the plugin is back. I just downloaded it at http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/rss-footer/ and it works great.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:30:38 +0000

Thanks for sharing! I was thinking about protecting my content as well, and this trick is the best, i think. Gonna try it now.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:11:33 +0000

If you prefer not to mess with your WordPress code, Joost has done it for you with his latest plugin:

http://www.joostdevalk.nl/make.....k-for-you/

Patrick