A WordPress plugin called CopyFeed or ©Feed can help you track down any RSS feed scrapers that are copying your hard work and publishing it on their blogs. This is a common problem for anyone that authors a blog. While you can’t stop anyone from taking your content and publishing it on their own blog, there are ways you can track them down and take action. If you own a WordPress blog, there are many plugins that can help you, including the ©Feed plugin that I will discuss in this post.
Keep in mind that there are several different methods of tracking down RSS feed scrapers, but I will focus this post on the plugin mentioned above. I will probably be looking at other such plugins in the future.
What does the ©Feed Plugin Do?
Before I talk about what the plugin actually does, let’s step back and take a look at how scrapers can take your RSS feed and publish it on their own blogs. An RSS feed is simply a plain text file that can be read by anyone, most notably with a piece of software called a feed reader. A feed reader parses, or reads, the RSS feed and displays it to a subscriber in a format that is easy to read.
Scrapers, however, have automated the parsing of the RSS feeds. When the feeds are parsed, the individual posts are then published on the scraper’s own blog or blogs. They do this to create content for their blogs, with little or no work on their part. All the hard work writing the content is done by the original author of the post. Once the posts are published on the blog, the scraper usually displays ads, such as Google’s AdSense ads, to try to generate income. This means that they are making money off work that isn’t their own.
The truth is that you can’t prevent them from scraping and displaying your content. You can, however, look into tracking them down, and then taking action. The taking action part is beyond the scope of this post, but there are many online sources. One great resource is Plagiarism Today.
To help track down scrapers of your RSS feed, ©Feed automatically will write a footer at the bottom of each of your feeds. The text of the footer is defined by you, but you can include such things as links to your blog or post, a copyright notice, and a digital fingerprint.
A digital fingerprint is a unique string comprised of numbers and letters. How this works is that each time the scraper copies your post to their blog, the footer will be included – unless they have edited the post to remove the footer. Now once a search engine indexes the content, you can search for this digital fingerprint and you should see the indexed pages that contain your digital fingerprint. Something so simple, yet so effective.
What options are Available for the ©Feed Plugin?
The good news is that the plugin is very easy to setup and configure. Let’s look at the configuration options.
The first part of the options, shown below, allows you to configure the copyright notice and the digital fingerprint. Some placeholders that you can use in your copyright notice are are provided below the copyright notice edit box.
©Feed - Copyright Notice
(Click to enlarge)
A suggested digital fingerprint is also provide, however, you can easily create your own fingerprint that you would like added to your RSS footer.
The last edit box in the copyright notice section simply provides the closing tags. There is a default notice automatically created for you that comes with the plugin. I have edited my footer so it displays as shown below.
©Feed - Copyright Notice Example
(Click to enlarge)
The next section is a set of optional settings that you can turn on or off. I recommend you keep the default settings as it works fine as is. The one issue I did find was that enabling the “Scan” option drastically slowed down the administrative pages of my blog. Use the “Scan” option sparingly, or not at all.
©Feed - Optional Settings
(Click to enlarge)
Now the next section allows you to define both a whitelist and blacklist of URLs or IP addresses. I’m not exactly sure what this does, as the description for lists are identical. There is also a blacklist message. I’m wondering if the the addresses in the whitelist don’t see the footer, while the blacklisted addresses get the footer, and an optional message. If someone finds out, just let me know in the comments.
©Feed - Whilelist and Blacklist
(Click to enlarge)
If you choose to, you can even have ©Feed insert the comments into your RSS feed. By default this option is turned off, and I recommend you keep it that way. I have yet to see any RSS feed that has comments included.
©Feed - Include Comments in Feed
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The final set of options allows you to insert related posts in your RSS feed. This may come in handy if you wish to include other posts from your blog in two ways.
©Feed - Related Posts
(Click to enlarge)
The first benefit is that your readers may continue reading the related posts you have included. The second benefit is that any scrapers that copy the content from your feed will also display the related post links on their blog. This allows you to also search for the links to your site as well to find your copied content.
This option is up to you on whether you want to enable it or not.
Is ©Feed Worthwhile?
While ©Feed can’t prevent your content from being copied, it is a good plugin to use to help find those who do copy your content. The options aren’t hard to setup, and besides the optional scan slowing down the administrative pages of my blog, I haven’t found any problems with the plugin. There are also other plugins that perform a similar task, and I’ll probably look at them in the future.
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on August 13, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Paul, this is a great plugin that I’m really glad you alerted me to. I have been hearing a lot about bloggers having their content scraped lately and this is just one less thing we need to worry about. I’m glad you mentioned Plagiarism Today, because I watched a video featuring they guy who runs the site, Jonathan Bailey. This plugin seems to address most of the issues he covered at WordCamp Dallas 2008. Here’s a link to watch the video http://basicpodcastingtips.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-stop-plagiarism-from-jonathan.html
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on August 13, 2010 at 1:47 pm
I saw that video a few days ago, which eventually led to this post. The CopyFeed plugin was one of the ones he mentioned, so I decided to give it a try.
There are other plugins be mentioned as well, that I may have a look at.
on August 13, 2010 at 3:13 pm
WOW. I’m loving the features of this plug-in. I would have switched over from Feed Layout but it doesn’t give me the option to add stuff to the beginning of the RSS feed
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on August 13, 2010 at 8:27 pm
I have heard other similar plugins allow you to add text and links to both the header and footer. I’ll have to check out the other options.
on August 15, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Paul, this is right on time. I have seen suggestions on ways to deal with content thieves after the fact, but this is the first time I’ve seen a proactive tool.
I usually randomly Google unique text, which is time-consuming and doesn’t happen often as a result.
Ironically, the only theft I ever experienced came from webmasters who abused EzineArticles policies by stripping off the bio box.
Thanks for sharing!
Cheers,
Mitch
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on August 15, 2010 at 7:53 pm
I ahve a few articles on EzineArticles, but I haven’t checked to see if anyone has stripped off the bio box. I used to search for links in my posts, but a digital fingerprint is much easier to search.
on August 19, 2010 at 11:42 am
Great plugin. I was looking for a way to insert custom feed footers.
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on August 19, 2010 at 12:08 pm
The plugin seems to work well. I haven’t had any issues with it.
on August 25, 2010 at 1:03 am
I took a different approach to deal with scrapers. Following the advice of Michael Graywolf, I added a related post widget that shows related posts in feeds along with RSS Footer that adds a couple extra links at the end of your post.
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on August 25, 2010 at 2:16 pm
The CopyFeed plugin has that ability as well, and the related posts plugin. I have been thinking about enabling that option as another way of checking for scrapers.
on November 2, 2010 at 2:40 am
Will definitely try this plugin, i hate feedscrappers especially those who don’t put our links back.
Sigh, on the Internet is definitely not easy.
Thanks for sharing this plugin, else, i would not know.
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on November 2, 2010 at 8:07 am
I don’t know anyone that is a fan of feedscrapers. You cannot prevent people from scraping your feed, but you can make it easier to find out where you feed is being scraped, and then take action.
on December 6, 2010 at 9:50 am
I’m always a bit wary about adding another plugin, but have been considering using a service like this for quite a while. However, just last night I read about a third-party service which searches for your content and creates an RSS feed of any copied content that it finds. The service is https://fairshare.attributor.com/. I haven’t used the plugin you mentioned, but unless it provides any exceptional advantage over the Fairshare, I’d definitely stick to the third party service to avoid bloating your WP installation
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on December 6, 2010 at 12:51 pm
I never heard of fairshare, but I’ll have to take a look. Thanks.
on March 29, 2011 at 3:09 pm
a must used plugin for every wordpress users.
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on October 10, 2011 at 5:54 am
Hm… This is really nice. I never knew about this before. Thanks a lot for sharing this!
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on October 17, 2011 at 7:18 pm
I love this kind of stuff when the smart guys put it back on the scammers and spammers. it would be good to see more of this kind of thinking in software tools.
Kind Regards
Secret (Steve)
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on October 18, 2011 at 8:09 am
It is always great to put one over on the scammers and spammers. RSS scraping is still a reactive, instead of proactive battle, mainly because of how the Web functions.