/industry-wired/media/agency_attachments/2024/12/04/2024-12-04t130344212z-iw-new.png)
/industry-wired/media/agency_attachments/2024/12/04/2024-12-04t130332454z-iw-new.jpg)
/industry-wired/media/post_attachments/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/7-Ways-to-Prevent-Your-Blog-Posts-from-Being-Stolen.jpg)
Stealing blog posts is the act of misappropriating another person's published content, usually on a website, to repurpose and generate income from ads and traffic. Scraper bots are used to copy large content volumes. They are also called web crawlers.
These bots are pieces of automated software that scan websites at regular intervals and steal content.
Having your content stolen can be maddening, but you can protect yourself – seven ways to do so are outlined below.
1. Optimize the robots.txt file
You can keep many bots away by updating your robots.txt file. Respectful bots are programmed to identify and read the file and obey its rules. Of course, quite a few bots will ignore the file, but optimizing it is an excellent first step.
2. Block IP addresses
You can search for the IP addresses of the scraper bots stealing your content. When you block them, the bots can't access your site anymore. You can use plugins or block addresses through .htaccess edits.
3. Lock content
To lock content in WordPress, install a special plugin called WP Content Copy Protection, which disables right-clicking and text selection. It also stops entities from downloading and reusing your images.
When you activate the plugin, it will get to work straight away. Nobody will be able to copy and paste content from your blog, neither humans nor bots. Content locking also blocks the content from being printed.
To adjust the plugin's settings, go to your admin panel in WordPress and look for the Copy Protection page. You can enable or disable protection depending on what content you want to safeguard.
4. Ban copying in your terms and conditions
You can ban entities from scraping your blog posts in your websiteterms and conditions. This extends to customer reviews, prices, and other elements that typically can't be copyrighted.
5. Change your RSS to summary mode
RSS feeds are built into most blogs, a fact not all bloggers are aware of. Content thieves use bots to scrape feed data. By default, the feed shares the full post in a format that's effortless to scrape.
You can change the feed to summary mode, which shows part of the post and sometimes just the meta description. To make this adjustment in WordPress, go to the admin panel, find the feed in the Reading section, and change "full text" to "summary" in the respective area.
6. Use anti-bot solutions to stop content theft
The best technical solutions detect and block scrapers without your intervention. Advanced detection engines usemachine learning and artificial intelligence to protect APIs, mobile apps, and web apps from malicious scrapers.
7. Delay scraping
Scraping isn't always a problem – the entity stealing your posts will not out-rank you in search engine results, and Google can identify scraped content easily. It does this by looking at when it was published. Google trusts the content that was published earlier.
There are other factors involved, such as the design and overall quality of the websites, but generally, Google detects stolen content. All you need to do is add a delay to when your blog posts can be scraped.
How do I know if my posts were stolen?
You can use Google Alerts, Copyscape, Unicheck, or Plagiarism Checker to see if your posts were stolen. When you add your unique content to Alerts, you'll be notified if it is published elsewhere.
Copyscape's automatic Copysentry service monitors the internet for copies of your blog posts and notifies you when they appear via email. Among the other copy detection services are plagiarism tools like Unicheck.