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One very large problem that a lot of blogs have (or will soon have) to deal with automated blogs that steal your blog posts and post them on their blog. The process is entirely automated and a great post that takes you three hours to write, they duplicate in 5 seconds. If Google would then view their blog before yours, they would rank higher in Google and your blog would get penalized for duplicate content!
The auto blogs steal your content by fetching the data from your RSS feeds, so here is where we can patch the problem. The oldest quick-fix was to add a RSS footer on every blog post that linked to your blog (Such as: “Copyright 2008 Blog Marketing Blog“). This is certainly better than having no footer at all, but recently Matt Cutts (A Google employee) stated that the best solution is to have the syndicated (or in this case, stolen) content link to the original article.
Matt Cutts: I would recommend the linking to the original article on the author’s site. The reason is: imagine if you have written a good article and it is so nice that you have decided to syndicate it out. Well, there is a slight chance that the syndicated article could get a few links as well, and could get some PageRank. And so, whenever Google bot or Google’s crawl and indexing system see two copies of that article, a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank.
So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: “You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that.”
In my opinion, I would want every blog that steals my content to link back to the source (so Google gives extra authority to MY post, not theirs), as well as giving me an anchor text link to my homepage. Go to your wordpress includes folder and make a backup of feed-rss2.php. Now, open the file in notepad and do a control find for “<?php the_content() ?>” without the quotes (It is on line 39 for me).
Add the following code right after the “?>” but before the “]]”
<p><a href=”<?php the_guid(); ?>”>Permalink</a> - <a href=”http://collinlahay.com”>Blog Marketing Blog</a></p>
Now I used my own blog URL as an example, so you should change that to your own link. For every person that steals your blogs content now, they will have a permalink back to the source (your blog), as well as a link to your blog homepage.
I would like to thank Stephan for the Matt Cutts interview and Blogstorm for the PHP code. There is also supposedly a plugin that does these two things, but at the time of the posting, the blog is offline.  (Update: the plugin is back online!)
Thanks for the info!
Great information….Matt Cutts informations are really reliable
[...] Well there is. And Collin LaHay shows you how. [...]
The blog is online again, let me know if there’s any feature you’d want in that plugin! (My blog couldn’t handle the digg stress of 2600 pageviews in 12 minutes…)
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
Thanks for sharing! I was thinking about protecting my content as well, and this trick is the best, i think. Gonna try it now.
Looks like the plugin is back. I just downloaded it at http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/rss-footer/ and it works great.
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…
Done. Thanks for the heads up.
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.
There is no permanent answer, as the spammers will always be here. We only try to make the best of a crummy situation.
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.