How to Find Spam Blogs Republish Your RSS Feeds and Make Good Use Of It
Introduction
If you have subscribed to a blog via RSS, you can easily read the blog in your feed reader. What if you could publish that to a different website? What if you could monetize that content? That is what copycats do. They subscribe to free RSS of popular publishers and republish the feed on a different website. This activity is illegal and a valid publisher can always claim against the copier. But in most cases, the publisher in unaware that his content is being copied. Moreover, it’s not that easy to file a lawsuit against the copier. That means we must find out a tweak to detect copycats.
How to find Copycats
For this tweak to work, you need to enable backlinks. That is, you need to show off who all are linking to your posts. (If your analytic program provides backlink details, then that will be enough). Every blogging platform automatically creates a permalink when a post is published. The trick is to include a link to the post from within the post itself. First publish the post and get the permalink. Now edit the post and link some relevant text to the same post. If you cannot find any related posts, just add your link to a “.” (dot) like this one.
Now publish the post again. This post will get published elsewhere through the copycat and a backlink will be given to the original post via the secret backlink included. Now the list showing track backs (Links to the post) will show the copycat’s link.
So I have found my copycat. What should I do?
Copying copyrighted content is illegal. But filing a complaint with DCMA or any other agency is not easy and waste times. So it’s better to make good use of or prevent (not easy!) than to cure.
If you are on Blogger
Login to your Blogger dashboard then naviagate to Settings -> Side Feed. In the Post Feed Footer, add the following code:<a href="http://www.my-blog-adress.com">My Blog Name</a>
If you are on Wordpress
I recommend RSS footer wordpress plugin. This very simple plugin let you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as anchor text.
Another option ?
Yes, another option is to do not syndicate the whole content, give out only the first 250 characters. If you do so, atleast write a feed with a good summary text that gives a complete idea to reader about the underlying blog post or else your readers will read meaningless sentences. But the drawback is, as I know, most of people (included me) don’t want to read partial feed then they might unsubscribe from your blog.
Conclusion
Copycats are not always bad. They might be making a little cash out of your posts, advertise your posts elsewhere. If you include inbound links in all posts, you will get pretty good backlinks and your Google PR might shoot up.
What do you think?
If you enjoyed this post, please make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
hey, that’s a very good idea. thanks a lot.
Nice tip. I always backlink to some of my other pages while writing an article. So even if someone else copy paste my content blindly…then he will be instead helping me lol by giving me a two backlinks.
Nice Trick Buddy..Thanks for it..I m surely gonna try it on my blog ..
Great Idea! I once had a copycat and was really annoyed.
I should try that.
Good to read that
Thanks for those tips man, Cheers
I think these copycats should be punished badly for this.
I hate copycats. They do easy job from someone’s hard thinking.
Awesome post. I have done part of this, but you have some really good tips here. I really like the getting anchor text in the backlinks ; )
the major drawback now is when the copycat actually copying and pasting the post manually and not using any rss feed poster.
Great tips. I didn’t know that we can take an advantage from it.
wow, this was really a great tip, thanks for this !
Wow..thanks for the great tip. I hate people taking my content but sometimes some of their host just don’t care.
I try to put a backlink in the first sentence of a post so that even if someone merely grabs the first paragraph, if the link is left in, then I get some benefit as opposed to none.
Never knew about this feature in blogger templates. Thanks for posting it, I’ll be using this since a lot of people like to grab my feeds without credit.
that’s a clever one..thanks for sharing..
I didnt know that people could do that. Im still kinda new to the blogging scene, and dont really even know exactly what an RSS feed does.. a little help here? thanks!
Maybe, we can use copyspace to detect the articles. What if the copycat doesn’t link back to us?
Great tip . But there are people copying posts manually , after something new is published .One method I found to link pages and images internally so that we would get some backlinks from the blind copier.
But I don’t think that our PR will shoot after getting few links from spam blogs