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I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this but last night i made a post on my wordpress powered blog here: http://blog.twostepmedia.co.uk/css3-still-novelty-or-usable-in-everyday-web-development/

then this morning i see this: http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/01/css3-still-novelty-or-usable-in.html

Is this right? Can someone completely clone a post of mine or am i overreacting?

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Yes, they can. There is nothing strange or technically complex about that. And before you ask - no, it's pretty much unrealistic to protect public web page from being copied.

My process to deal with such goes roughly like this:

  1. Contact blog owner and point out that your posts are not meant to be copied and that is not allowed under license/terms ( © in Two Step Media © 2010 ) of your blog.

  2. If not successful report to his hosting. Additional mean and pleasant step is to report to advertisement companies that are used on site. Most of the time scraping is done for profit so hitting profit is exactly what hurts and makes a point.

  3. Give up or get legal stuff involved.

Since blog in question is hosted by Google and not self-hosted it's very likely 2 (if not 1) will get it done.

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Thanks alot for this lengthy response! What would you do in this situation? In terms of SEO, his blog post of mine actually ranks way higher in terms of keyword search... – benhowdle89 Jan 14 '11 at 9:17
Well exactly what I wrote - I would do 1 then 2 then give up because in minor cases it's not worth nerves, etc. – Rarst♦ Jan 14 '11 at 9:31
At least they list your blog as the source though - many content scrapers don't even bother – Amanda Jan 14 '11 at 11:23
up vote 0 down vote

Sadly you've encountered a blog that aggregates content from other peoples blogs and posts it automatically to another blog. Plugins like WP Robot make it easy to parse blog RSS feeds and scrape posts. Other than reporting the blog which most likely won't do anything, you're out of luck.

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oh dear. Just annoys me that its kicking my ass on google search rank! – benhowdle89 Jan 14 '11 at 10:39
I think you can also contact Google if your content is stolen as well and have the offending link removed from the search results. This link will help you get the offending blog contents removed and most likely his whole site removed from Google's search index: google.com/support/webmasters/bin/… – DigitalSea Jan 14 '11 at 10:45
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This must be done via rss theft.You should use rss anti leach plugins if available for your cms. And disable full feeds. Moreover, you can also add a small watermark on your images via using Water Mark Plugin.Also ping your post, so google indexes them fast. If he is cloning your post, don;t worry he will not be able to rank higher than your post.

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