Expert Blogging Tips – How to Deal with Stolen Content

Lorelle VanFossen publishes a very readable and useful blog about WordPress and blogging in general called Lorelle on WordPress.  Lorelle recently attended a WordPress event in Israel and she has published a helpful post containing tips and suggestions about how to get the most out of WordPress.  I recommend this post to all bloggers – new or experienced.

I was particularly interested in the section where Lorelle wrote about how to deal with the problem of content theft.   Content theft happens when an unscrupulous blog owner "scapes" your content and puts it on his own (Google Adwords stuffed) blog.  Often the scraped blog (called a "splog" within the blogging community) will contain scraped content from several legitimate blogs on a particular topic.  The splogger then includes a trackback hoping to pick up page rank from the legitimate blog.

As Lorelle points out, these sploggers are content thieves.  In the "How to Stop Content Theft" section of her post, she identifies several specific tactics to deal with these content thieves.   There is a splogger who scrapes every post from my Atlanta bankruptcy blog and I am going to try some of these suggestions.  I’ll report back to see how they work.