Effective Ways To Protect Your Blog’s Search Engine Rankings
Image Credit: copyright
The following post has been written by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, more of his articles can be found at his blog.
There are a number of ways to protect your blog from piracy, but there is a tangible cost no matter what you do, and sometimes letting them steal it actually helps you in the long-run.
The first method of protection is filing DMCA requests with Google, other search engines, and perhaps the host of the site scraping your content. But honestly this can be tough to keep up with if it happens over and over again, and is probably a poor strategy given that the internet is truly global.
An easier method of protecting copyright is to simply publish partial feeds instead of whole RSS feeds. This means that while an RSS scraper may steal your content, they will not be getting much of it from you, and what they get should not be able to harm your rankings.
The third strategy is to use their content theft as an SEO & link building strategy. If you frequently reference your older blog posts in your current blog posts (using absolute links – not relative links) that means that the scraper sites will be providing free links to your content. Over time as you build up a real audience and your authority you should *usually* outrank the scrappers for your own content. A friend of mine named Joost de Valk created a Wordpress extension which automatically adds links to your site in the footer of your RSS. If you have pages that are hard to build links to and hundreds or thousands of scrappers are linking to them that could help boost your rankings for related keywords. If you use an extension like RSS Footer make sure you mix up your anchor text and footer occasionally in case anyone trained their bot to strip it out AND to help keep your anchor text profile a bit more natural.
Copyright is increasingly irrelevant each day, and being unknown is a bigger risk for most bloggers than getting outranked is. If you really push eventually you should get credit for most (if not all) of your content. In the next year or two if they have not yet solved the RSS scrapper issue I believe the major search engines may launch tools to help you register your content by submitting it to them before publishing it so they know the source.
Many people copied my ebook and distributed it across the web widely without my permission. My three solutions to that were to either encrypt it with DRM software, stop selling information, or break information into smaller pieces and keep adding premium content and sell it as a membership site basis. Instead of giving up or crippling my product I decided to launch an online training program and back it up with a community forum that turns it into more of an experience rather than just a commodity piece of information.
Posted in SEO News By Aaron Wall.
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March 21st, 2008 12 Comments
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March 21st, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Some good thoughts here, I’m increasingly trying to include linkbacks to my previous posts so when this does happen, I am getting something out of it.
The cases I’ve seen with my content so far haven been ok, using only an excerpt and then giving a link anyway, but piracy of your content would definitely be enough to annoy you if nothing else!
March 21st, 2008 at 6:12 pm
This is one of the web’s most interesting stories on Fri 21st Mar 2008…
These are the web’s most talked about URLs on Fri 21st Mar 2008. The current winner is …..
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I get scraped a lot and because they’re using the whole of the article, which nearly always includes links to other articles of mine, they’re doing more good than harm.
Legally chasing them down would be a total waste of effort and money. Most of these websites are MFA (Made For AdSense) efforts, which would be a like chasing a ghost…
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:22 pm
How about Google finding out that there are several versions of the text published? Won?t that hurt your PR?
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Hi Jack, it will not have any effect on your PageRank as long as Google knows that yours is the original.
March 23rd, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I beg to differ. Those copies do damage! The copies DO definitely change SERP results, even if they don’t obviously seem to change PR.
It may depend on how much has been copied and reposted, but Google does NOT apparently know which version is the “original” when someone puts my content up on a new domain. My whole site frequently gets scraped. They change the copyright from mine to theirs and publish it on another domain name. As soon as it happens, my site drops lower or out of the top 10. So, I dig around until I find the newest copy. As soon as I zap it with DCMA, my site pops back up.
One guy broke my site up across around 20 MFA sites (Thanks Wayne – love “Made for AdSense”), and I was able to shut him down by reporting him to Google as a spammer. Did keep my fingers crossed that time that they wouldn’t think I was a spammer, too, though. But, they didn’t.
Wish the ad networks, like Google and Yahoo!, were MUCH more picky about AdSense publishers – it’s almost always a MFA or “Made for Yahoo! Search Marketing” site that’s guilty. Too much trouble to do all that content creation – it’s hard work!
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Hi Susan, in that case it will effect your rankings and your PageRank, you need to try and build up the authority of your blog so that the spammers can’t take your rankings, if you build up your authority then the spammers will not be able to beat you and your rankings and PageRank will not be effected. If you use Wordpress then you should get the plugin that Aaron has mentioned in this post. Try and build links to your blog any way you can, submit it to blog directories, swap links with 2 or 3 other bloggers in your niche, have your friends submit your best posts to social bookmarking websites and after a while you will not have to worry about anyone stealing your rankings. Post your URL and I will hook you up with a couple of directory listings which may help a bit.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:06 pm
hey
im also using WP232 and i noticed taht your site meta tags, keywords and descriptions are present on the main page but not on the single posts and archive…also the title of your page changes dynamically with the title of the posts…how do you do that?
how to avoid making duplicate titles and descriptions…?
thanks.
September 13th, 2008 at 6:51 am
great article thanks for sharing it
jasmine celion
adsense-blogtips.blogspot.com
November 15th, 2008 at 8:39 am
How about Google finding out that there are several versions of the text published? Won?t that hurt your PR?
I’m a little afraid of that
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:52 am
Sharp work Aaron, always like to read something from you!
March 26th, 2010 at 2:20 am
Hi Jack, it will not have any effect on your PageRank as long as Google knows that yours is the original.