AND THEY'RE OFF!!!

It’s a race, my lovely minions! You just wrote a fabulous post and can’t wait for Google to latch on to it and send you tons of traffic.

But, wait! What’s this? Your article… on other blogs?!? But… but… but…

DOH! You’ve been scraped!

If you have a blog, you probably have an RSS feed. Every time you write a new article, the RSS feed is updated and your subscribers know that you’ve written something new for them to check out.

Most subscribers are harmless… actual people who are interested in your niche topic.

Unfortunately, some subscribers are actually bots… their only intention is watching the RSS feeds of other blogs in order to scrape the content and republish it on their own websites with no attribution to the original author.

Aside from being annoying that someone else is taking credit for YOUR work, scraping can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.

Search engines are smart, but they are limited and are sometimes confused… especially when they come across a dozen identical articles on a dozen different sites. It can be incredibly difficult to tell where the original came from because these bots can grab your article and repost it to their site within seconds of your hitting the Publish button.

Generally, search engines rank the original creators higher than sites that have simply copied the article… and the copies may be weeded out of search results entirely.

It’s such a sickening feeling to realize a website that reprinted your article word-for-word is ranking above you in searches… even worse when their site shows in the rankings when your site is nowhere to be found.

It’s compounded by the fact that surfers may think YOU’RE the content copy-cat because your site isn’t as high in the rankings as the competitor with the same article, so you lose a bit of credibility.

As long as people continue making money from these types of sites, scrapers aren’t going to disappear any time soon.

Even if they don’t make much money on one site, it’s too easy to set up hundreds of these types of sites with relatively no maintenance. A little here… a little there… it all adds up to pad their bank accounts.

Several bloggers tried adding links within the text to indicate that they’re the original author, but scraping programmers quickly caught on and began adding preg_replace commands to remove those links.

A few months ago at PubCon 2011, Matt Cutts suggested the use of fat pings.

Huh? I’d heard of pings… I routinely use sites such as Pingoat and Pingler, but I had never heard of fat pings. So… what are they?

Normal pings simply notify RSS services that a new post has been written. They usually only include barebones information like the post title and URL.

Fat pings are a way to not only let people know in real time that you just wrote a new post, BUT it also sends a complete copy of that post to hubs like Google Reader, Google Alerts, and FriendFeed.

Even IF a scraper has enabled fat pings to their own site, their copy will lag a few seconds behind yours. Fat pings make it EASY for Google to tell which article came first and give preference to the original creator.

(Just remember… this is all in theory…)

If your blog is hosted by Blogger or on the WordPress site itself, fat pings are already enabled. Whenever you publish a post, Google is alerted with a copy instantly.

If you’re like POD For You and host WordPress on your own hosting account, there is a PubSubHubbub plugin you can install to handle fat pings for you.

Simply go to Plugins > Add New and do a search for PubSubHubbub. Install, activate, and tweak the settings to your preferences.

Guess which plugin KayeCee just installed?