PB108: What To Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Content

Note: this episode is available to listen to in the player above, on iTunes and Stitcher Seven Steps That Can Combat Content Thieves Today’s podcast was inspired by a question from Grant. He asks:“I just discovered another blog is republishing my content in full on their site. They seem to be scraping every post using my RSS feed. Can I stop them and is it worth my time to do that?” Is it worth your time to do anything? In the past, I would try to chase down sites that stole my content to avoid duplicate content penalties, but Google has gotten better about knowing who the original author is. Now, I just do a couple of things to identify that the content is mine when it is being scraped. I include links to other posts in my blog I include a link back to my blog in the footer of my RSS feed When the content thieves strip out my links and don’t acknowledge the source, I still go after them and try to get the content taken down. Below are seven steps that can be taken to combat content thieves. In Today’s Episode What To Do When Someone Steals Your Content Contact the site concerned - First step, contact the webmaster and explain they are in breach of copyright and ask them to remove the content immediately. Whois - Run a Whois check and find out the name of the person the site is registered to, their email, their registrar, and the name of their host. Contact the site’s host - If you don’t hear back from the webmaster concerned, you can contact the host and issue a DMCA takedown notice. Contact the site’s advertisers - If they still won’t cooperate, you can hit them where it counts and contact the advertisers on their site. Losing revenue will get their attention. Shame the suckers! - If all else fails, and they are especially egregious. Name and shame is an effective way to deal with them. Highlighting their activities is the first step in getting the site removed. File to get them banned from Google and other search engines - Getting banned from search engines will get their attention. File a notice of infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Google. Legal Action - This is the last and most difficult course of action, but it is an option that is always open. Simple Whois information should be enough to begin the process. Usually, a polite notice and conversation with the offending blogger or webmaster is enough to get the content taken down, but if they don’t respond the above tactics can be applied. Further Resources on What to Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Content Yoast’s SEO Plugin Copyscape Whois Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Google Copyscape 6 Months of Blog Post Ideas How did you go with today’s episode? Let us know if you have ever encountered this problem and what you thought of today’s show. Never miss an episode - Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, and welcome to Episode 108 of the ProBlogger podcast, where today I want to talk about what to do when someone steals your content. Not a very nice thing to happen; it does happen a lot though. I want to suggest a strategy that you can use when someone does use your content in a way that you're not happy with, that you want them to stop doing, and you want to take that content down. I also want to address the question of whether it's worth tracking down people stealing your content. My answer might surprise you a little bit. Today's show notes can be found over at problogger.com/podcast/108, where you'll find some resources and tools that we recommend you do check out on this particular topic. You'll also find information about a new little resource that we've created over a ProBlogger where we're willing to give you six months of blog post ideas for free.