This post contains affiliate links.
After nearly three weeks of working with a websites DNS provider, Hosting provider and contacting the web administrator I have finally noticed that all of my stolen content has been purged from the offending site. This has me relieved and I owe a huge thanks to Jonathan Bailey from PlagiarismToday for helping me find the hosting provider and providing templates of DMCA Copyright infringement notices that I was able to use to send to the offending sites hosting provider.
The easiest way for content providers to steal your content is not by cutting and pasting your article as you would think. What these content poaching websites do is read in your RSS feed with wordpress plugins and then spin your entire feed into a blog post on their site. There are only a few ways to try and plug this loophole up and those include the following:
Use Summary RSS Feeds instead of Full Post Feed
This is an effective way to ensure that nobody can read in your full feed and steal 100% of your article, the bad thing is this prevents your regular readers and fans from being able to read your full content from the convenience of their email or RSS reader. So it is a trade off and one that I heavily considered and would consider in the future if I run into this situation again.
Add Copyright Information To Your Feed
Okay, this one I did myself just recently. I downloaded and installed the RSS Footer plugin for WordPress by Joost De Valk which is a fantastic plugin which allows you to add custom text, links and information to the bottom of your RSS feed. It is so simple to install and configure and anyone who reads in your full feed will have the extra task of manually having to strip out your copyright information or else they would be blatantly displaying they are stealing your content on their site.
Summary
Those are pretty much the only two mechanisms I can see to try and thwart poachers, but ultimately if they want to steal/copy your content verbatim there is nothing that prevents them from cut/pasting the text right off your site. Though this will help deter and easily find anyone who feeds your RSS into their site, this is especially true if you put a backlink to your site in the RSS Footer where you will get a pingback potentially notifying you that another site is reading in your feed.
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
Latest posts by WPX Support (see all)
- What Posts and Videos Will Get Popular is Still a Mystery - December 16, 2016
- Poem: Weeping Priest - October 30, 2016
- Reflecting on 8 Years of Dragon Blogger - September 29, 2016