If you publish a blog on Wordpress, Blogger, or other platforms, then it probably didn’t take long to discover that your content can end up on all kinds of websites. Luckily, search engines are pretty good at crediting the content to your own site, so you enjoy the benefits of improved search engine traffic in addition to the improved credibility (and exposure) that your blog creates. From an SEO standpoint, there are some minor advantages to this wholesale duplication.
Most content scraping is done by offshore sites and content aggregators, which essentially copy everything that gets published through blog platforms. These sites simply add your blog entry to millions of other pages on various sites, and then automatically place advertising next to the content. They get paid every time someone clicks on an ad, and the payment is anywhere from a penny to a few dollars. (Most of the time it is a few cents.) The scale of this content scraping is quite large, so these sites can make a profit even if a very small percentage of their pages are visited. Even though search engines prefer original content, and give it greater prominence, there is obviously enough traffic generated from large-scale copying to pay for hosting and overhead.
What can you do to prevent copying? Not much. Since the site owners are offshore, and the ownership of servers and hosting is pretty murky, you (the blogger) are probably not in a position to challenge someone operating anonymously under some foreign country’s lenient copyright laws. However, you can improve your link popularity, albeit from lower-end sites, by making sure that you embed links into your content that point back to your own site. Despite the fact that these sites have minimal quality, they are at least indexed by Google, and therefore the link popularity coming back from these sites has a certain amount of value. As site content and links age in search engines, you might as well reclaim some of the credibility that comes from getting your content scraped without permission.
Naturally, not every site that copies or quotes your content is on the dark side of SEO, and in this case peppering your links into content can be beneficial. If your blog is topical, offers value to an average person, or answers common questions, it can get referenced by people who are using your work as an authoritative argument. If you get quoted by these users, and your link remains intact, you are getting even more link value. Therefore, it pays to put at least one link in your blog that either references your homepage or a related topic. Although there is no substitute for good high-powered link building, there can be an aggregate benefit to getting picked up by the otherwise spammy world of content scraping and aggregation.
