We are agreed that the content creation industry is a competitive one. You will do your best to create useful, attractive content to make your traffic and raise your revenu. But programming can make everything. Someone may steal all your content easily and make the same traffic that you can’t get with scraping tools. In this article, we will help you to avoid content scraping activities on WordPress.
What is content scraping?
Content scraping is the process of copying the content on your website. Content scrapers are the people or software that copy the data. Web scraping itself isn’t a bad thing. In fact, all web browsers are essentially somehow content scrapers. You may read a useful topic and write about it with some more adding and so on. But other one may work on WordPress freely, get free theme, and install free plugins, then get all your content just like it’s case. This isn’t a good thing right now.
How Content Scraping Works
Through a series of automated tools, people can scrape content from a collection of websites and present it on a blog as though that content originated from it all along. The most common method of scraping employs RSS scripting (Really Simple Syndication). There are many plugins that designed to extract content from other websites and move it to other one.
Both use the PHP, ASP, jQuery or some other programming language to scour the web or target a specific news feed and steal content related to specific keywords.. Once the content is found, the tools save it to a different website’s ftp server or SQL database for visitor retrieval and presentation.
How Content Scraping Impacts your WordPress Site?
Duplication the content on internet will affect your SEO rank and make it lower in search engine results. It may affect on your customers that may leave to other website to avoid any mistaken ideas . Search engines may also penalize your site for having duplicate content while you are the content creator.
Types of Content Scrapers
- Spiders: Web crawling is a large part of how content scrapers work. A spider like Googlebot will start by crawling a single webpage, and go from link to link to download web pages.
- Shell Scripts: Just Linux Shell, you can use to create content scraping tool. By using scripts like GNUs Wget to download content.
- HTML Scrapers: These are similar to shell scripts. This type of scraping is very common. It uses the HTML structure of a website to find data.
- Screenscrapers: A screen scraper is any program that captures data from a website by replicating the behavior of a human user. They use searching and browsing to get the content from internet.
- Human Copy: This is happening when someone human copies the content from the website. Just copy from a website to paste in another.
Ideas To Prevent Content Scraping
1.Prove authorship to Google
You need to prove your authorship to google. For this, you will need Google account and will have to verify your website ownership in webmaster tool. Once done you can use their service to claim your content.
This tool is the best choice that provided from google to webmasters and bloggers. You can use this tool to prove your authorship to the content even against old big website. Because Google use to punish the new website owner.
After the releasing google authorship verification, search bots know where and which website is pushing up new content and which one is copying it or is promoting spam.
2.Block known scrapers via IP number
You may know about the scrapers that steal content from you so you can use the IP block to avoid content scraper by them. But IP blocking is not easy, and depending on your experience, it could require outside, expert help. That’s why you may need to install IP blocking plugin for this task.
3.Rate Limiting
You need to know about scrapers before dealing with them. Bot is an application which make requesting from the same IP with an unusually high number of requests. So you can block the number of requests which is coming from an individual client.
You can do things like measure the milliseconds between requests. If it’s too fast for a human to have clicked that link after the initial page load, then you know it’s a bot. Subsequently block that IP address like the previous step.
4.Use a CAPTCHA
Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captchas can be annoying, but they are also useful. You can use one to block areas you suspect a bot may be interested in,and it’s better than using emails or registrations. There are many good Captcha plugins available for WordPress.
5.Frequently Change the HTML
This can mess with content scrapers that rely on predictable HTML to identify parts of your website. You can mess up with this process by adding unexpected elements. Facebook used to do this by generating random element IDs, and you can too. This can frustrate content scrapers until they break. Keep in mind that this method can cause problems with things like updates and caching so be careful.
6. Obfuscation
You can obscure your data to make it less accessible by modifying your site’s files. You can use some applications that convert the text to images to make it harder on human scrapers to copy and paste the text. You can also use CSS sprites to hide the names of images to make it comfortable for users too.
WordPress plugins to prevent content scraping
Copyright Proof
It’s one of the easiest plugins to prevent content scraping. This little addon helps you to verify all your content for copyright, licensing with digital signature and time stamp. It will even add these legal notice along with attribution support at the end of each of your post.
Finally, the previous methods will help you to reduce content scraping but they will not prevent them completely. So do your best to protect your work. Please, tell us about your experience in content scraping.
