Thanks to tools like WordPress, publishing content online as never been easier. But how many times did you saw your own posts, republished on other websites without your consent? Content theft is definitely a big problem for bloggers.

In this article, I’ll show you how to fight back content thieves the best you can.

Content scrapers: Why they are (quite) harmless

Content thieves are divided into two categories: The first are content scrapers. What they do is quite simple: They create a blog, steal posts from other people and republish it on their site like it was their posts.

Some people do it manually, but most are using tools such as the AutoBlogged WordPress plugin, which allow you to “auto-blog”, ie. scrap content from RSS feeds and insert it into your blog.

Content scrapers are essentially looking for money: They steal content and display a large number of ads, and hope that Google will index their posts so they’ll have visits and hopefully, clicks. In my opinion, content scrapers are mostly harmless, because they’re not going to steal your visitors, neither your search engine rankings, thanks to duplicate content detection.

Though, content scrapers are still boring. The following two tips will discourage most of them to steal your content.

Put links on your post titles

As most scrapers are using automatic scraper tools,they’ll scrap all of your content, including the post title. A good way to discourage scrapers is to automatically put a link on your post titles, so each stolen post will automatically link to your original post.

To do so in WordPress, simply open your single.php file and locate where the title is displayed. Then, replace the code by the following:

<h1>
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
</h1>

Prevent hotlinking

A very negative aspect of content scrapers is the effect it can have on your server. Most of the time, scrapers will display images from your site on theirs, which means that they’ll use your bandwidth. This process is called hotlinking.

If you’re on a shared host such as WpWebHost, that’s not a big problem because they offer unlimited bandwidth, but many hosts like vps.net (They host CatsWhoCode.com) only offer limited bandwidth. In this case, the bandwidth used by content thieves can quickly become a financial problem.

To prevent hotlinking, append this code to your .htaccess file. In WordPress, this file is located on the root of your installation. Make sure you have a backup before modifying the .htaccess file!:

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

The result should look like this:

Use them at your advantage with affiliate links

As I previously said, content scrapers steal all your post content, which means they’ll also scrap your affiliate links. And this is great, because if someone click on it and buy the related product, the affiliate comission will be paid to you, not the scraper.

There’s no particular technique to implement: Just think about using affiliate links everytime you can.

Plagiarist: Fighting digital thieves

If content scrapers are the first category of content thieves, plagiarists are the second. What is a plagiarist? It is someone that steal a part of your content and re-use it without giving you credit.

If you follow my CatsWhoCode account on Twitter, you probably know that a boy with a WordPress related blog plagiarized my work various times. I’m not going to give names or details on here because I do not want to make publicity to someone who’s not deserving it, but believe me, that’s annoying.

Unlike with content scrapers, you can’t do a lot to fight against plagiarists. Happilly, bloggers hate plagiarism and the simple fact of tweeting about the theft can prevent him to do it again.

Unfortunely, some people are more stupid than others and despite having their plagiarism exposed, they’ll still continue to negate the theft, and worst, they’ll do it again. In that case, it’s time to use the law at your service.

The USA created a law in 2000, named DMCA. (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) I don’t know much about this law because I’m not American, but it allow you to send a notice to the theft and to his partners, such as webhost or advertising business like BSA or Adsense.

I haven’t sent any DMCA yet, but from what I’ve heard, 99% of content theft will stop plagiarize you after you sent them a DMCA notice.

Here is a standard DMCA notice of copyright infringement that you can send to the theft hosting company and/or advertising partners such as Google Adsense.

Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement

The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on www.yoursite.com/page1.html.
The URLs where our copyrighted material is located include www.theft.com/index.html and www.theft.com/about.html.

You can reach me at you@example.com for further information or clarification. My phone number is +1-000-383-8764 and my mailing address is John Doe, 45, East 49th Street, New York 10001 NY.
The email address of the website owner, who has reprinted our content illegally, is syed@theft.com.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

John Doe
March 10, 2010

Good luck fighting content thieves. Any more tips or advice? Leave me a comment below!