Nothing agitates me more than when I see another website stealing my content. Well, maybe seeing unicorns killed for tasty unicorn burgers, but that’s about it.
It especially infuriates me when I do a Google search using keywords from my article and the other website is listed either above or below mine. You’d think that Google would be smart enough to know that the other website is a rip off of mine, but sometimes that doesn’t happen.
This is probably a no-brainer for those of you who are smart with web development and/or hosting, but for an amateur like myself, I just figured out how to block another website from stealing my content.
I use a DNS Look up tool and enter the website that’s stealing my content. I get that website’s IP addresses and take them to my hosting cpanel. Under the security section, I visit the IP Deny Manager or IP Block Manager (or something similar), and I add the DNS of the offending website. Voila… my copied articles and content disappears.
Now they could change the DNS, but that wouldn’t be a fun game of cat and mouse for them. They probably spend their time sucking the life out of plenty of other websites and wouldn’t even notice you blocked them.
Anyway, it’s my way of getting a bit even. If all that fails, you can send them and/or Google a DMCA takedown notice, but this is easier.
Adios, content pirate.
Elliot, there’s ‘stealing content’ and then there’s ‘content syndication’. People need to understand the difference, as I believe it is important to understand.
If someone is taking the time to copy and paste your content and post it on their own site and pass it off as their original content, then that’s one thing.
But, with RSS feeds being so readily available now, a blog owner needs to realize that content syndication (with proper attribution) can be a good thing. It can help your content get more eyeballs.
If the other site is taking your RSS feed, for example, and posting it on their own site and getting it indexed quicker than when it’s on your own blog, then it can be a search engine ranking problem: there are ways to deal with that on the back end to make sure that Google sees your content as being the “original”.
I personally like it when someone syndicates my RSS feed(s) of my blog(s), as I am usually linking to other pages on my site in my blog posts: and those blog posts then get links from whoever is syndicating my content.
There’s a big difference between content theft and syndication.
@ Bill
How about if someone’s website is an exact replica of yours, complete with all of the same images and articles? The only difference being the domain name… and they were indexed in Google.
@Elliot If you take the title of your blog post or a sentence from the blog post and put in “quotes” in Google, your site or blog should come up first in the search results.
If that other site outranks your site then I would take steps to make sure that your content gets indexed first. It also helps if you get some additional links to each blog post, as well. Social media promotion of blog posts is a good thing.
If the site doesn’t outrank your site, then honestly I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless it just is “eating at your soul” and you’re bothered by it.
The only way to deal with this realistically is to visit the address on the whois and kidnap their children’s pet bunny until they cease and desist.
Or – what I would be tempted to do is replace the feed they are stealing with somewhat lower brow content and make their site look even stupider lol.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless it just is “eating at your soul” and you’re bothered by it.”
But it is eating at his soul, as he said before, the only thing that agitates him more is the slaughter of unicorns.=)
“How about if someone’s website is an exact replica of yours, complete with all of the same images and articles? The only difference being the domain name…” thats pretty bad. i once worked for a software co. that was doing 7-figures in annual sales, and discovered that someone had done the exact same thing, but not only just a different domain, but was actually squatting on the company name in a different tld. we had company.com, and they were using company.ph and had scraped all the content and translated it into another language and were selling our pirated software off of the scraped site.
Wow, you’re nice Elliot. I do something similar but I serve up a special version of the page to their IP address with all kinds of nasty stuff embedded in it 🙂
@ Hax
LOL 😀
Thanks for sharing Elliot – this happens to me all the time and is definitely REALLY frustrating. That’s what I love about video – if they steal my video and post it on their site they can’t take me out of it!
The real question is, can you recommend a good Unicorn Burger in NYC? The place here in LA uses artificial Unicorn meat, just doesn’t taste the same!
Serve a page or pages with beneficial links to that IP.
Does this mean you are going to start block Domaining and Namebee? Oh wait, I am confused.
@ Tommy
The site had copied everything… Domaining and Namebee copy just a small portion of my articles and are helpful. The site I blocked was just a parasite.
ErriotsBrog in China very very simirar to your Brog.
Copyscape.com can help determine the scope of plagiarism. And for all its faults, the DMCA is your friend in this regard. The process isn’t overly complicated. Best of luck.
I use a plugin called RSS Footer by Joost de Valk. This embeds a link within the RSS feed back to the original source.
Dozens of sites scrape my feed, but I don’t mind because it’s marginally valuable free backlinks and Google can easily recognize the real deal.
You can block them – if you know the IP of the scraper but that might be on a different subnet than that of the web site that publishes the scraped content.
If a DMCA notice is in due order, I wrote a quick tutorial back in February when both Elliot’s blog and mine were targeted: http://bit.ly/dCnlhb
I have my coders attack them min full force.
Injections, packets… They stop.
Was the site an exact replica? I had an issue this summer (after I switched my hosting) where I was suddenly finding duplicates of my site in other countries. I’d wondered where all the hits from China and Mexico were coming from, so I did a Google search, and sure enough, there were copies of my site at two different locations.
It was some sort of a redirect, because clicking on any of the links took people back to my site. But it still made me uneasy.
I contacted the other domain owners, and the one from Mexico got back to me and said his DNS had been hacked. It turns out the issue stemmed from GoDaddy’s static IP hosting, because this happened within days of switching to them. Once I took the site off static IP and back to regular shared hosting, it stopped.
If they’re just scraping your content, that not good, either. Copyscape is a good service for that.
Will the real Slim Shady please stand up 🙂
I use the “blog protector” plugin. Disables right click and copy & paste function. If anyone tries, a small window pops up and you can display anything you want in it. Mine just says “Nope!”
@Jerry: From menu, View | Page Source | ctrl-C | ctrl-V …done.
@SL: I guess it is just that easy..
back to the drawing board, lol 🙁
Thanks for the article this is GREAT I really love the time you’ve put into this what my question is… how do you make it impossible for them to physically copy off the site, more or less stopping them from left clicking a mouse and copying everything I’ve written word for word and then going to their website right clicking and posting it.. how do they do this lol? Please help I think it would help a lot!
google me Karonv if you like I have a couple websites but just starting~