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A Very Short Story
In the not so long ago, I was having problems with a particular site scraping my RSS feeds to steal my content. If you have been following WAHI for any length of time, you know this is a continuing problem (many of you have faced the same dilemma too).
Of course, it happened again, but instead of trying to deal with the culprit as I did with the last thief, I started looking around for a better solution – one that would work for ALL such nefarious content stealers.
Gary over at Phoenixrealm seemed to be having the same problem, Bad Guys scraping his feeds. He was lucky enough to be alerted by a reader of his to the problem, so he put the question to his community.
In reading the comments section, I noticed a response from SEO Carley telling about a service provided by FeedBurner. NoIndex. Frankly, it could have been there for a while and I just never noticed.
A Possible Solution?
Go to your FeedBurner account, click the Publicize tab and down at the bottom click on the NoIndex link in the sidebar. By default it checks off “Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines”, however, you need to Activate the Service. There is also a place to check if you do not want your feed indexed by Yahoo Pipes.
For me, this is in the experimental stage, if the feed isn’t indexed by the search engine spiders, it is highly unlikely that it will be picked up by the Scrapers Spiders.
In the same vein, it may not be picked up by some of the services you want to grab your feed. Things like We Blog Alot, Blogwise and services like Ping-O-Matic may not work either. Don’t know, I have to keep a close eye on some of these services.
How About You?
Have you tried the NoIndex feature in FeedBurner? Has it helped solve Your scraping problem? Is there a better way that you know of?
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2 Comments
I frequently will split my post up using the “read more” feature to thwart the scrappers.
I also heard about putting a nasty little note in your feed that says something like if you are reading this you are reading a freaking scrapper site..
Hey Adam,
I did the copyright thingy as well as a scraper warning on the feeds along with a link back to me. The scrapers just copied that too. That’s why I tried this new step, it seems to work, BUT I dropped almost 100 subscribers.
It may be time to rethink this strategy.