Archive for April 30th, 2009

I have recently been the victim of content theft on my bodybuilding and fitness blog, where some unscrupulous website owner stole the content of this article high intensity hill sprint interval training session and posted it on their own blog, as if it were their own content.

At first I was furious at this because their page was ranking in Google before my page was, despite my page being the original content. It turns out however that this is fairly commonplace and happens to lots of bloggers.

I decided that I wasn’t going to stand for it and that I should do something about it. First port of call was Google, to flag it up as duplicate content. To do this, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en and report it. You will need to put in offending URL, then the search that you entered into Google to find the duplicate content (spam) and lastly the Google results page that it brings up. There are a bunch of check-boxes, select “Duplicate site or pages”, then there is a free text box to add in your own words about the problem.

After you’ve submitted the spam request to Google, it’s worthwhile trying to defend against this happening in the future by making some amendments to your WordPress installation. Sorry if you are using other bloggin software, but I have no experience of them so can’t help.

To add a copyright notice and related posts to your feed, download the Copyright Feed plugin from WordPress, install it on your blog, then activate it via the Plugins tab.

Once activated, you will need to go to Settings tab and click on the ©Feed tab to amend the settings. I have added a digital fingerprint to mine. To do this, I just did an MD5 hash of a phrase that is dear to my heart, and I’ve kept a copy of this phrase on my dev server. This means that if I do a search on Google for my digital fingerprint, I should find any offending content thieves - assuming they haven’t removed the digital fingerprint from the content they steal!