Protect yourself from content theft
After receiving a comment on this post I made I have decided to rewrite it and retract some of the things that I had stated. I had a miserable week fighting with this issue and I had a bit of an outburst and truly apologize for it. So this is what I do have to say though.
Protect yourself from content theft. This is the only thing that will keep your site going and keep bringing you users. If everyone else has your content why would someone come to your site to find it? This is an ongoing issue in the Internet world. You spend many hard hours coming up with content that was so well thought out and planned for and to find out the next day it has already been stolen. You go round and round trying to stop them. This can be a nightmare. Trust me I know. The people who host some of these sites can be very difficult to track down right away. You may never be able to contact them directly even.
So now what do you do. Well fortunately there are a few things you can do that I will mention here but I also think you may want to follow the comments because there is great information there as well plus a blog that is directly related to this type of thing.
Report them to the host they use, search engines and any advertising program they are using such as google adsense. Well that is not all you can do. Here is another thing you may try. Keep in mind that this is only my opinion and I in no way make claim that this will actually help your situation but here is the other idea that I have.
Make posts that you know will end up on the thief’s website stating very clearly that they have in fact stolen the content. We have done this and even if it does not stop the theft it is surely amusing to knock these guys into the dirt by showing how they have stolen your works. Also I have noticed this that you may want to take note of and use to your advantage whatever that may be. I am yet undecided as to what is better here but if you have href links in your post you may want to make sure the links include the full path including the domain in the url. This will make sure that the content links back to you providing they do not strip the links. Other wise if you use a relative link then your links that were in your post will link to pages on the thief’s website and may only trigger futher scraping of your content. So pro to having an absolute link is that it will be an inbound link to your site. Con it is a link from a poor relationship and that association alone is not really good but I am not an expert so make your own opinion for that. Good luck to you all. I know I will need it 
March 14th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Well unfortunately there is little to nothing you can do outside of reporting them to the search engines and any advertising program they are using.
That statement is completely untrue. There are many things that you can do if your content is being stolen. First and foremost is report the site to its host. The DMCA safe harbor provisions more or less require hosts to remove content that is infringing from their servers once they receive a proper notice.
If you know how to file a DMCA notice, you can get scrapers shut down. You can also use the DMCA against them to remove them from the search engines and then from their ad program.
Second, you can always send a cease and desist letter to the thief, warning them to remove the content or else. Most comply just to avoid the hassle.
There is always WP plugins to help you cloak the content, hiding your real work from the spammers.
Finally, in some cases you can report the site to its domain registrar, getting the entire dot com yanked. That doesn’t work all of the time, but I know several people that have done it.
In short, there’s a lot that you can do beyond posting indecent pictures to the spammer (possibly exposing children to the content) and reporting them to the search engines.
All one has to have is a strategy.
March 14th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Indeed Jonathan you are very much correct. I do agree that it is not a good idea to put such content up and I agree that it would be very bad if a minor had stumbled upon it. I would feel miserable for that. I must apologize really for making that post in haste. After getting the run around from the reseller and then from the actual host when reporting this to them I got a bit short tempered and made that post.
A bit later today I think that I shall edit the post a bit. I must really thank you though for your comment. That is a wellspring of information in it and I and other viewers alike I am sure will benefit greatly from it. Thank you again.