A part of blogging is dealing with people who want to steal your content, whether it be through a completely automated method or through a manual copy-and-paste method. In the past, I covered how to deal with content scrapers, but this time, it’ll be all about embracing them to your benefit.

Content scrapers aren’t going to go away any time soon. They are making money at what they are doing, so they will continue doing it. Their campaigns and attacks will continue growing, and there will be little that you can do except hope that they don’t copy your entire site word-for-word onto a unique domain and garner better rankings than you in search engines.

It’s all about manipulation for them. Many of them feel that as long as you know they are stealing your content, you will continue to attack them on your own. Legal action can’t really be taken, as some of the people hosting the sites are overseas, and different copyright laws go into effect. Talking to the website owner doesn’t always work.

Include More Links within Your Content

Links that point back to your site, even when they are on a “spammy” site are good for you. People often stumble upon these sites, and even if they are at least a little bit interested in the content, they’ll try traveling to other internal links, only to find them pointing to your site.

If they are stripping out links, that is when I would begin to consider taking more serious action against the offending site.

It’s About Spreading Your Ideas and Content

You essentially have one platform with several distribution channels to get your ideas out. They are referred to as social networking sites, but aren’t entirely useful unless people have already heard about you and understand what you are doing.

Having a scraper site pick up on some of your articles, and people will quickly pick up on your content. It isn’t the desired situation, but it works. You’ll very well be searched for additional content.

Use Licensing

Licensing your work through Creative Comments encourages others to share and distribute your content. Who wouldn’t want this free promotion? You have to understand that there will always be people who abuse these licenses, but that is something we all deal with every day.

Conclusion

Taking advantage of the scrapers/thieves who have abused some of your copyrights isn’t always negative. Take a positive look at things. Consider that you still have all your visitors and readers on your current site, you haven’t lost all your content to a hacker, and your reputation is still intact.