How to Protect your Website from Scrapers.

There are many unscrupulous people in the Internet that are too lazy to write their own content so they just go search for a topic they want and copy and paste it into their web pages.

Following are a few tricks you can use to protect your content:

Pop out of Frames Tag. This allows your page to pop out of a frame is someone copies your page and puts it into a frame.

Full URLS. If someone copies your page and forgets to change the URLs to their own site then the links to your own page will still work.

Base HREF Tag. This tells the browser that all relative links (those without the domain included) originate from that domain. So if the scraper copies the base href tag then the search engines will also figure out that this article was copied from somewhere else.

Add links to your own website within the content. Scrapers are so lazy they often forget to take out URLs.

Increase your Page Rank (PR). Search engines sometimes consider websites with higher PR than yours to be the original author of an article so it's very important that you get your PR as high as possible if you intend to write a lot of content for your website. This is why scrapers often prey on new websites with no PR.

Save the article as a Web Archive. Search engines keep a copy of everything on the Internet so if you write original content they "usually" know who put it on the internet first, but not always. To protect yourself always save your new pages as "web archive" in the "save as" feature on your browser. This will save images and text and also the code of the webpage which you can use if you ever need to prove who saved the article first. Of course the best means of proving who owns the page is to pay for copyrights of the article.

Add your site name within the text. Scrapers are often too lazy to carefully edit the text. This enables you to search for your site name along with the article title and find the scraped article.

Add a totally unique phrase to the page. This enables you to find your article if it does get copied by searching for that phrase in the search engines.

Sign up with Google Alerts using that unique phrase. Google will notify you when that text shows up on another website.

Add a watermark of your domain to your photos. This helps you to prove that the photo was stolen.

Contact the scraper or scraper's host. See this article on the steps to get your stolen content removed.

Copyright the article with the US Copyright Office. This isn't always cost effective if you write a lot of articles and especially if you update them frequently so the other means mentioned here might work to prove authorship.

Rewrite your article: If you don't want to bother with trying to get your article removed from the scraper's website just rewrite the original.

Lori Eldridge
Copyright © 6-13-09
All Rights Reserved