Can anyone stop auto-bloggers?

Auto blogs are typically generated from grabbing RSS feed content.

So if a site disables its RSS feed that would put a stop to most scraping.

Hello fin,

If your website has an RSS feed, you should remove or disable it immediately. It's where the autoblogs are relying its source for scraping content.

Whilst you can disable your RSS feed, additionally you can also seek out wordpress plug-ins that disable the right mouse-click function, as well as the ctrl+c function. That should deter most would-be content thieves.

I think if there's a plugin to stop autoblogging, that product will be less popular .... autoblogging plugin will be more popular to sell, and more people will buy it because of the "easy money"..

It might take a SOPA like law... or simply existing laws being enforced to punish those breaking the law. If the hammer drops then that might seem good.

Laws exist to preserve order.

autoblogs suck wind.

I remember some larikin coming in here saying they would last forever. ha ha. They were doomed from the start.

If you don't want your rss feed synicated, disable it. Or you could fill your rss feed up with advertising and make money from it being syndicated.

I haven't seen a plugin, but a quick search provided multiple ways to either cloak the RSS feed from scrapers or block them altogether using .htaccess files.

Tip: RSS isn't only way to scrape contet from your site.

It's never bothered me if people scrape my content... I'll ALWAYS kick their asses with superior marketing

James Scholes

By the way, autobloggers scraping your site can actually be beneficial.

Case in point, my partner and I once ran an entertainment site in the science fiction niche. We got around 3000 uniques per day to that site and ranked PR4.

Our first largest source of traffic was Google, but guess what our second largest was?

A sci fi autoblog.

Lots of people found their way to this autoblog, and because we only published our article intros to our RSS feed, everyone that wanted to read the full article clicked through to our site.

So allowing this autoblog to reprint our article intros basically acted as free advertising to us. Like running huge amounts of AdWords but instead of us paying, the autoblog got its income from AdSense. Not a bad deal really.

We ultimately sold the site for high four figures, thanks in part to the traffic we received from this autoblog, and the new owner forced this autoblog to remove the site's feed.

His traffic dropped immediately.

So when the conditions are right, i.e. the autoblog clearly gives you attribution and a link back to your site, you publish intros only, and there aren't too high a number of autoblogs using your content, they can actually do you quite a bit of good.

Hi fin, look up something called tynt publishing, its a script that you put in your sites header/ footer.

It won't stop your content from being scraped, however when every content is taken from your blog it'll automatically add a link about to the place it came from. i.e. the auto bloggers will be building backlinks and syndicating your content for you.

Welcome to the internet, where content is syndicated, distributed, shared or spread...sometimes WITHOUT your permission.

If you can't handle this..don't publish anything in the first place, or better...avoid making a website and the internet in general.

On a serious note, the concern IMHO is silly since the syndication and distribution of YOUR (yes your!) content, in what way, be it in a "legit" way or via means of auto-blogging etc. also means to get YOUR article "out there". Otherwise, the internet would be a static, dead place!

It might be that some of your work gets distributed without proper attribution and links - but ALSO that your work/articles get spread "properly"..not all auto-blogs (as far as they still exist today!) actually strip out links.

I am always puzzled about the complaints by people who submit articles to big directories like ezine, goarticles etc. and then a week later they are totally shocked seeing their articles elsewhere. As said, welcome to the internet!

If something can be made to start autoblogging then something can also be made to stop autoblogging

If a website owner is concerned about content being scaped from their site then they can come up with the idea themselves and hire a programmer to stop autobloggers from scraping their content

This thread is so full of mis-information that it's laughable. I can scrape any page, any time, any word, sentence or paragraph, omit any parts I want (such as ads worked in), save it to a mysql database in any way I choose, retrieve it and present it in any way I want on a new website. I don't need a single rss feed to do it. Disabling right-click and Ctrl -C wont help you at all (that was the funniest comment I read). It's called CURL and it's a very common php function.

And it's quite profitable. I won't say scraping will be around forever, but it's still years away from being stopped (the only way it could be is if Google's algorithm advanced far enough along to remove sites from the index almost immediately) and it's still highly profitable.. as in over 5 figures a month profitable. And there's not some programmer than could stop it so long as text is text on web pages.

RSS feeds do make everything much easier though.

You might be able to do what you described using CURL, but the fact remains that the majority of autobloggers are using plugins like FeedWordPress and other similar WordPress plugins.

Most people aren't fluent in PHP so they use what they can get. And for most people that's a WP plugin that grabs an RSS feed.