Herself's Webtools

Everyone has had their blog scrapped. Some of my blogs have even been totally cloned elsewhere. While you can take up a war against bots and scrapers the RSS feed still sends out your entries to anyone who wants them.

All of the major blogs about blogging claim you should run a full feed to get the most traffic. After seeing a blog of mine totally cloned I stopped doing that. There was a 10%-30% increase in blog traffic when I went to a partial feed. Now my blog traffic seems to jump every 3 months anyhow so it may have nothing to do with my rss feeds. But it certainly did not hurt to go to partial feeds.

Another tactic is to try to put a link back to another entry in your blog somewhere in the first few sentences of your articles. Then even if it gets reposed there will be a link back to your blog. A blog can’t ever have too many links.

I ran across RSS Footer Options a WordPress plugin that will allow you to add a link or comment to every entry in your rss feed. And there is MaxPower’s Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress which puts a fingerprint in your rss feed which you can then use to locate republished material.