Perisable press has a good run down on dealing with content scrapers, as does Chris Coyer at CSS Tricks the general view is do nothing and take advantage of it where you can. Summary of good advice from perishable press below...
How to Deal with Content Scrapers
So what is the best strategy for dealing with content-scraping
scumbags? My personal three-tiered strategy includes the following
levels of action:
- Do nothing.
- Always include lots of internal links
- Stop them with a well-placed slice of htaccess
These are the tools I use when dealing with content scrapers. For
bigger sites like DigWP.com, I agree with Chris that no action is
really required. As long as you are actively including plenty of
internal links in your posts, scraped content equals links back to
your pages. For example, getting a link in a Smashing Magazine article
instantly provides hundreds of linkbacks thanks to all of thieves and
leeches stealing Smashing Mag’s content. Sprinkling a few internal
links throughout your posts benefits you in some fantastic ways:
- Provides links back to your site from stolen/scraped content
- Helps your readers find new and related pages/content on your site
- Makes it easy for search engines to crawl deeply into your site
So do nothing if you can afford not to worry about it; otherwise, get
in the habit of adding lots of internal links to take advantage of the
free link juice. This strategy works great unless you start getting
scraped by some of the more sinister sites. In which case..
The stack network is content scraper city so it would be interesting to hear the advice of some of the high level admin's on this topic...
