As a followup to my announcement of the new FeedEntryHeader plugin, I thought I’d share a screenshot of it in action. Predictably, the announcement post was scraped within minutes of me publishing it. Here is what the output looks like on the splog.

As you can see, the links have been stripped, but the URL remains. Hopefully anyone reading this page will work out that they aren’t viewing the original article and copy and paste the URL into the browser to read the original.

It’s also worth noting that all formatting has been removed, as have been the images. If you are reading a post that looks like this, you should be able to recognise it as a splog even if there is no copyright statement.

Marking Splog Trackbacks As Spam

In the comments of the previous post, Jonathon mentions that he is receiving trackback from the splogs. If you get such trackbacks, mark them as spam. It’s very important you do this.

If enough people mark trackbacks from a particular splog as spam, Askimet will start marking all trackbacks from that splog as spam automatically.

If you leave such trackbacks in place you may be passing PageRank to the splog. One of the reasons that we are fighting a losing battle is because of the vast number of links such splogs get.

Many of the original authors get a trackback, but don’t realise it’s from a splog because they don’t follow it. If you don’t follow all your trackbacks, you won’t know if someone is writing something nice about you, or scraping you.

Digital Fingerprint

Someone asked me why I couldn’t use the Digital Fingerprint plugin instead. I looked at Digital Fingerprint before writing FeedEntryHeader. I haven’t used it, but it seems to be a great idea and I recommend you check it out. However, it’s purpose differs from what I wanted FeedEntryHeader to do.

Digital Fingerprint’s purpose is to track who’s scraping your content, while FeedEntryHeader’s purpose is to redirect readers back to your site.

The idea behind Digital Fingerprint is that it inserts a ‘fingerprint’ into your feed, so that later you can search for pages that contain this fingerprint. This should let you find any splogs who have scraped your  post. The fingerprint needs to be unique (ie won’t appear anywhere else on the Internet).

It seems to be possible to use a copyright message as the digital fingerprint, but it would have to be generic (ie the same for all posts). There’s no ability to display the post URL, which makes sense - after all, you want to do one search to find the scraped content, not a different search for each post.

The strength of FeedEntryHeader is the fact that it includes the URL back to the original post. The idea is that users will see the copyright statement before they read the article, work out what’s going on and use the URL to visit your site to read the original post.

There are other plugins that do something similar in the footer. That’s too late. There’s less chance the reader will visit your site if they’ve already read the post. Also, some splogs chop the bottom of the post off.

Anyway, FeedEntryHeader and Digital Fingerprint have different purposes, both of them worthwhile. Although I haven’t tried it yet, I see no reason why they cannot be used together.

I recently discovered that my feed was being scraped. It’s very frustrating to find your content appearing in full on another website - so I decided to do something about it.

The result? A new WordPress plugin called FeedEntryHeader that allows you to add a copyright statement and a link to the original article, to the top of your feed entries.

Why Use It?

There are several WordPress plugins that allow you to add a copyright statement to the end of feed entries. However the copyright statement has limited impact by the time the reader gets to the bottom of the page.

The reader is more likely to take action if they see the copyright statement at the beginning of the page, along with a link to the original article.

It won’t stop feed scraping, but it should ensure that a copyright statement and a link to the original article appear in the scraped content.

What Does It Look Like?

Here is a screenshot from my feed in Google Reader:

As you can see, the following message has been added to the feed entry:

Copyright © 2007 Stephen Cronin. Visit the original article at http://www.scratch99.com/2007/11/feed-reading-models/.

Can I Change The Message?

Yes. The message is fully customisable. Simple HTML can be used and there are tags allowing you to use site name, site URL, post name, post URL and author name from the WordPress database.

The default message uses the post URL, rather than the post name, as the anchor text. This can be changed, but many scrapers remove all links, leaving only the anchor text behind. If the URL is the anchor text, it will remain.

Although this plugin was designed for displaying a copyright statement, there is no reason that you could not display other items instead.

Where Do I Get It?

Further information about the plugin can be found at the FeedEntryHeader plugin home page. The plugin is also available for download from the plugin home page.