RSS Footer Plugin Is A Great Link Building Tool
Caution: Your content is being stolen!
Black hatters are scraping your site.
Its time to fight back!
I know that sounds a little over the top, but I was struck by a black hatter last week and it cost me some traffic.
I spent several weeks working on a site using WP e-Commerce. While I was working on the site I kept a log of all the changes required and I wrote a SEO tutorial for wp ecommerce.
After I wrote the post, it was number three overall for “SEO wp ecommerce” in Google the next day. It was already bringing in some great traffic.
The next day I did a search and found my post at number three in Google, but it was not my site! I was very upset, after all I spent many hours working on the post.
I looked up the site’s owner in whois and sent him an email. I also left a comment on the site asking for a link back to the original post.
While I waited for his reply, I emailed the search commander and asked him what he would do. He said there was not much as far as recourse since the offender was not in this country. He sent me a link to Google’s solution for this type of problem.
He also alerted me to a very cool plugin, called RSS Footer. Basically, it puts two links into the footer of every post in your RSS feed. Matt Cutts said this is a good way to foil RSS scrapers because they always link back to the original post and Google will credit the original poster.
Fortunately, the guy who took my post was kind enough to put a link in his post to my original post. It did the trick…the next day I was number two overall in Google again.
I emailed the RSS scraper and told him he had my permission to post all of my content, as long as the RSS footer links were left intact. So, RSS Footer gives you a way to leverage RSS scrapers as a link building tactic.
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You should sign up for my RSS feed here
If someone scrapes my content, does that affect my position in the Google SERPS?
hi Jason,
Thanks for tip on RSS footer. I’m going to check that out.
It looks like you changed your blog/site theme. Looks nice.
One thing though is if my browser window isn’t all the way open, the left side of your post is unreadable. I usually have a few windows open and don’t have any of them all the way. Something to consider. You may want to check your minimum column width?
~ Steve, purveyor of fine portable trade show booths
@Steve. Thanks, I am glad you like my new design, and I am not quite sure what problem you are referring too? What browser are you using? Thanks for the heads up.
Steve, I see the problem…hmmm…I will try your solution…thanks again.
hi Jason,
I should have said that I was using Firefox3. I’m not sure it’s the browser though, I think it’s a browser window size thing. I don’t know how many people surf with the browser at full size vs a partial window, so I don’t know how many will notice.
~ Steve, purveyor of fine portable trade show booths
Thanks here i found some great tips and tricks …
Nice post, carry on….thank you..
I wasn’t aware that people would pinch your article and use it on their site if its already indexed by the search engines. The plugin sounds a good idea and hopefully when start to post on our blog the content wont get pinched.
Wow! What a fantastic idea and a great way to protect ourselves.
I’m going to go install that plugin right now on my blog.
Very cool.
Thanks for telling us about it.
Eren
I have used RSS feed plugin in one of my autoblogs. Really works great!!