Atma Xplorer

Xploring Games, Computing, Photography

Protecting your content

Prevent RSS Scraping – Use plugins

Kuya Dexter‘s post on inserting links in your RSS gave me the idea for adding security to my current RSS feed. If you check it now you’d see this line at the very bottom.

My secured feeds

Now it may not be able to prevent people from manually copy-pasting your content but it will foil automated scripts (just like the scraper in my example) and that’s what were after.

How do I insert the code for that?

Basically you don’t need to. The plugin I’m using for it, Better Feed, provides a default setting of providing a link to your home page per feed. I felt it was somewhat lacking so I took the time to customize it. Here’s what I added:

  • The post title and posturl
  • The category for the post
  • The date and time of post

If you don’t feel like customizing the feed on your own, simply download my customized version here. Note that you can do these customizations on your own and that I don’t claim property over the plugin.

Now if you still feel unsecure after adding that to your feed, why not try using Digital Fingerprint? This plugin inserts a digital fingerprint (obvious from the name isn’t it?) in your entries so that it can check against other blogs if your contents are being plagiarized and/or scraped.

If you’re posting lots of images, you may want to watermark your images. You can do that via the Watermark plugin.

Has my content been scraped?

You can use these sites to check if your posts have already been ripped.

My content has been copied, what should I do?

If, after using Plagiarism Checker and/or CopyScape, you found splogs (spam blogs) mirroring your content, don’t panic! The easiest (and most civil) way to go at it is to contact the scraped is to contact the scraper personally via email or a contact form. If that doesn’t work then you can go to the proper authorities (for example, if it’s on blogger, you can email the blogger admins) for help on the matter. If you’re serious about it, you can always go to court but that depends where you live.

Hopefully these tips helps.

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Comments ( 4 )

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  1. dexfamily Dexter January 16, 2008 Reply

    Grabe, thanks for the link.. I just found another scrapper here:
    http://googleamd.blogspot.com/2008/01/protecting-your-content-sendmerss.html

    • atmaxplorer sylv3rblade January 16, 2008 Reply

      Wow. That makes 3! At least this time he’s providing a backlink to me. ^^
      Hmm… he’s bypassping my .htaccess filter.. I better update. Thanks for the heads up.

  2. arnel Arnel January 16, 2008 Reply

    Very informative post….. it’s gonna be a big help for everyone.

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