Less than 24 hours ago, we published part two of our series “Attacking Scrapers And Content Thieves - Legally”. We chose to focus on techniques to secure and protect your feed from scraper sites and content thieves like TechAddress.com, one of the most prolific high profile scaper sites around. The site is camouflaged to be something of a digg-type clone but it is nothing more than an install of Wordpress running some plugin to automate sucking and scraping RSS feeds.
Many site owners might be OK with the whole thing. Your site shows up on TechAddress and you might get a little traffic. Don’t be lulled into this type of thinking. They are stealing your content and making money off it.
TechAddress says
“Techaddress is all about user powered content. Every article on techaddress is submitted and voted on by the techaddress community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you!”
We never submitted a post to TechAddress and our posts automagically appeared after their feedbot visited our site. Sorry to get technical with you TechAddress, but feedbots don’t count for “user powered content”.
We set TechAddress up yesterday in our post and they fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I had noticed TechAddress’s pattern of scraping our site. After analyzing things, I was able to predict to within about 30 minutes as to when our site would be scraped.
I posted yesterday’s article and within about 30 minutes, TechAddress had scraped the content. The only problem for TechAddress was, by using techniques discussed in our post, TechAddress was being fed fake content by the Antileech plugin. TechAddress didn’t care. They published the fake stuff anyway. It’s not like they had a choice really, you’re just supposed to start a cron job and forget about it, right?
Here is a beautiful screenshot of the mess that is TechAddress when you fight back.
After TechAddress scraped our post, I went back and added two paragraphs to the original post about them scraping the article hot of the press.
This was not the only post from our site scraped by TechAddress. They have been doing this for months. They had several of our posts verbatim on their site. We had planned on doing this for a while so we just kind of let them build up a nice archive of our posts.
Today, less than 24 hours after the exposure, all of our ripped content is coming up 404. Here is the shot of yesterday’s scraper bomb post going 404 today.
I guess they got the message.
Are you being scraped by TechAddress or another high profile site? Feel free to email and tell us about it. We would also like to hear of any other high profile scraper sites you know of.
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