Feb.
12
2007
Scraper sites steal your content. Use them to Build Your Traffic.
Scraping RSS feeds or stealing entire websites is the bane of any webmaster. Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to keep RSS feeds from being scraped or used. However, there are certain things you can do to make the scraped content work for you.
The ultimate goals are to make sure that you are credited with your own writings and that someone can get from the scraped feed to your website. Hence, you’ll get both links and visitors by following some simple suggestions.
- Use absolute URLs.
- Begin posts by including your name and/or blog.
- Hyperlink your name to your about page.
- Include a link within the first 2 lines to one of your blog entries.
- Link to at least one to two of your posts in the body of the entry (depending on the length)
- Include the name of your blog within the post.
- Include a link at the end of your post to ‘related or other information’.
- Quote yourself or reference another post within the body of the text.
It’s difficult to follow all of these guidelines on every post. However, for your favorite posts – it’s suggested that you take a bit of time to make sure you end up with the credit for your own writings.
Ha! I always think this when my blog gets scraped (not many times, admittedly, but it has happened). The first thing I notice is another link on Technorati, then I visit the page and they only use the first couple of paragraphs of my post and I get a link back. I have no complaints and I can’t imagine they get much out of the excerpts of my posts.
Thanks for the tip about linking yourself to your about page… I will remember that one!