Tag: rss

Take Advantage of Content Scraping

Firstly, a definition of “Content Scraping”. My own:

Content Scraping is the process whereby your website content is copied, usually via RSS feed pulling, and re-published at another URL, usually for financial gain.

Secondly, an admission. I currently engage in some content scraping myself but completely for the right reasons, ie – local resource creation and with no ads plastered all over the place. I also provide credit and back links to the original sites.

So what’s the best way to deal with scrapers who steal your content for all the wrong reasons? Most would say, search for exact copies of your content or post titles in Google to find scraped articles then contact the site owner to have it removed. There are technical ways you can block scrapers too but my favourite idea is to use the scrapers for your own benefit. Here’s how.

Internal Linking

While writing posts, simply include a few ‘key worded’ links to other pages on your own site. When your content is scraped, so too will be the internal links so the scraping site will automatically give you some great key word back links and real readers will be pushed back to your site too. SEO benefits all around!

Affiliate  Links

If you are an affiliate marketer, add some affiliate links in your post content and if those links are clicked on the scraping site, you’ll earn dosh!

RSS Manipulation

Since your RSS feed is probably the means by which your content is scraped, why not edit your feed layout to include links back to your site or include affiliate or ad banners? This is easy to do if you use the WordPress SEO plugin.

Leon

Use your own Short URL’s for maximum Branding Effect!

URL shorteners are used a lot these days, mostly on the likes of Twitter and Facebook to make sometimes ridiculously long urls short and sweet. I, like a lot of social media contributors, have my business blog setup to auto post to both Twitter and Facebook and Twitter in particular with it’s 140 character limit really requires some compression when you are linking back to a blog post.

I’ve been using Dlvr.it for a while to take my Blog’s RSS feed and articles and distribute them out to other social media sites and they’ve recently introduced the ability to brand their short links with your own custom domain so that instead of people on Twitter seeing a link to your blog post like “dlvr.it/12345” they will see (in my case) “rvb.ie/12345” (rvb stands for Reverb Studios!).

All you need to do to set this up and running is purchase a new domain name and add a DNS record pointing to the Dlvr.it site, then login to Dlvr.it and add the new custom short url to your RSS sources. Here’s some simple instructions on how to do it:

http://support.dlvr.it/entries/171525-how-do-i-set-up-a-custom-short-domain