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Thanks to Lance Winslow for asking the question. What about those people who steal the content created by others, put them on a blog and earn AdSense money from them?

In the old days, people did that with articles. They still do. But there is another form of this type of content theft that people are using along with WordPress, which is the blogging platform that we at Blog Content Provider recommend. It’s called scraping.

Here’s what they do: They subscribe to your RSS feed and use a software program to search for specific keywords in your content. When they find the keywords they are looking for they scrape that content and add it to their blog, a process that takes just a few seconds because it is done automatically by the software program. The slap an AdSense ad next to the content they just stole from you and “trackback” to your blog, which creates a link to you, but also a link from you to their blog - that is, if you approve their comment.

Now, wait a minute, Allen. Haven’t you encouraged people in the past to trackback to other blogs for traffic? What’s wrong with that?

Yes, I have encouraged trackbacks and I still do. But what’s wrong with scraping is a little bit more nuanced than merely marketing original content. The proper way to trackback to another person’s blog is to write original content on your blog that references the content on the other. Then you can tell WordPress to trackback, which effectively makes you and the other blogger partners in an ongoing conversation. Using content created by someone else without adding your own flavor of original content alongside it is unethical. It is a form of stealing.

What these scrapers are banking on is that you will approve their comment and your website visitors will click through the link in that comment to their blog and click on the ad so that they’ll earn revenue from your content. They know that their blog will not rank for any keywords. It’s duplicate content so the search engines will ignore it. They likely aren’t doing any article marketing to promote that blog either because that takes time. These scrapers are lazy and want the easy way out. That’s why are stealing your content and offering a “trackback” in an attempt to appear legitimate. They are taking a legitimate practice and mirroring it so as to appear legitimate themselves. Crafty, isn’t it?

Well, all you have to do to stop them in their tracks is not approve their comments. When you notice a comment in WordPress, follow the link to the owner’s blog and read what they’ve written. If it looks like someone wrote the post and linked back to you then approve the comment. If it looks like a part of a post that you wrote with a link back that says something like “Read the rest of the article here” then don’t approve it. They won’t gain access to your blog’s readers and they won’t make a dime off of your content.