Business blogging tips and news for professional bloggers

Someone stealing your blog content?  Just ask Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today to help you.  I've seen a few unscrupulous websites copy my content without permission and even try to make money off of it with advertising.  But I didn't really know how to respond.  Then I discovered Jonathan's blog the other day and asked him the following question:

How can I stop content scrapers from stealing what I write and monetizing it?

Here's Jonathan's advice:

- Most content scrapers steal your blog's content via your RSS feed.  So make sure your feed is secure.

- If you have a FeedBurner feed (like BusinessBlogWire), pay attention to the "Uncommon Uses" link in the main tab of your FeedBurner user account.  FeedBurner is pretty good at noticing content scrapers because they use your feed in uncommon ways.

- Consider truncating your feed - making it partial as opposed to full.  Content scrapers are less likely to steal something they can't copy in full.

- Try hiding or moving your blog's original feed (the one that you give to Feedburner when you first set up your account).  See Jonathan's tips.

- Fight content scrapers by reporting them to advertisers like Google.  Contact the hosts and let them know you're not happy that someone is using their servers to host stolen information.  (Read Jonathan's tips for Blogspot users.)

- (My tip) Subscribe to search feeds for your blog's name, your blog's URL, your name, and the topic(s) you write about.  That way you can find out instantly if someone's copy of your content is being indexed in blog search engines.

Hope this helps.  Contact Jonathan Bailey for more info on content plagiarism and what you can do to stop it from happening to your blog.