Contentjacking: The New Cyber Crime isn’t new, but it’s growing. I’ve seen copies of my articles on other Web sites attributed to the person or no one, but the site (unsurprisingly) has no contact information to address the issue.
Moral: I believe that mentioning the names of the author and linking to their sites goes further than trying to take credit for publishing the content. People are smart. They know when they arrive at a scraper-like site and they leave as fast as they can.
It’s also annoying to see trackbacks or links to your articles on scraper sites, which of course use “nofollow.” These sites have “no one” behind them. They have a lot of nonsense and of course, ads in hopes to make a few bucks. I hope these sites aren’t successful, but they probably are otherwise we wouldn’t see so many.
You can use Google and Yahoo Alerts to track content to watch for contentjacking, spambacks (spam trackbacks) and spamlinks, but I don’t track my articles — too many. But you may have some articles or content that are important to you that would be worth tracking.
You may want to consider ego alerts. In other words, create alerts with your name and Web site. Hey, ego alerts aren’t about seeing how many people think highly (or not) of you — but an opportunity to connect with others who took the time to mention you or your site.
3 thoughts on “Stealing Content and News Alerts”
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Great post Meryl!
My fear is that Google can’t differentiate between the original article/site and the stolen/scraped article resulting in the orignal site being penalizedf or duplicate content!
Agreed. Even I have a hard time. One time I linked to an article written by a friend as I saw it in one of my readers… turned out I had seen it before when it was originally posted and forgot.