Having your content scraped and used on spam sites is a chance you take when publishing a full RSS feed from your blog. I’ll go out on a limb and say I don’t think there is anyway to avoid it. At least I haven’t been able to.

In a perfect world your content would never be scraped. In a decent world if you contacted the scraper your content would be removed from the scraped site. However in our world, you can rarely find the owner of the site and if you are lucky enough to actually find an email address they are non-responsive at best.

My latest plan of attack is a simple solution that may help deter scrapers for at least a little while. It simply involves placing a message at the bottom of all your posts in your RSS feed that links back to your site and informs the reader they are reading a plagiarized version of your content.

There’s a couple ways you can easily do this.

Self Hosted WordPress

The most efficient way is to append each post in your RSS feed with a simple message and link. You can do this in the funcitons.php file of your theme. Simply add the following code changing the message, of course….

<?php
  function fight_scrapers($content) {
  if(is_feed()){
  $content.= "<h1><a href=\"http://RonisWeigh.com\">";
  $content.= "If you are not reading this on Roni's Weigh OR ";
  $content.= "your RSS reader then it has been plagerized!";
  $content.= "</a></h1>";
  }
  return $content;
  }
  add_filter('the_content', 'fight_scrapers');
  ?>

This will add–in large text by the way–the link "If you are not reading this on Roni’s Weigh OR your RSS reader then it has been plagerized!" to the bottom of every post in your feed only.

Solution for WordPress.com or Blogger

If you are on WordPress.com and you don’t have access to the functions.php file you can implement a lower tech solution. First add the following syle to your CSS file.

.protect {
	display:none;
}

This is a simple style that will hide any content that has the protect class applied to it. Now simply add something like this to the bottom of all your posts…

<h1 class="protect">
<a href="http://RonisWeigh.com">
If you are not reading this on Roni's Weigh OR
your RSS reader then it has been plagerized!
</a></h1>

The "protect" class will hide the line on your blog but since the RSS file does not have access to the CSS file it will show in the feed and on any sites that scrapes the feed.

Note

The scraper still has access to your content but at least any readers that happen to stumble on plagerized versions of your content can easily find you. Not to mention you are now getting additional incoming links from the scraper’s site.