Spam Blogs Republish Your RSS Feeds? Use this to your Advantage

It is not uncommon to find websites who republish RSS feeds of other blogs without permission. Why they do this is anyone’s guess but as a content owner, this is something to worry about especially when you publish full feeds.

That’s because when duplicate copies of your articles exist elsewhere on the web, some search engines may have trouble finding out the true source. What if Googlebot discovers the reprint before stumbling across your original article?

So how do you deal with such content scrapers?

Well, you can either take the legal route or try something simple - just add a link to your original article somewhere in the RSS feed. When search engine see this link, they’ll instantly know the real source and therefore splogs, who blindly republish your stuff, will indirectly work towards improving your own search rankings.

If you are on Blogger, open your blog dashboard and go to Settings -> Side Feed. In the Post Feed Footer, add the following code:

  My Blog Name

This will add a link to your main blog at the bottom of every article in the RSS feed. For this to work, you should be syndicated full feeds as Blogger would add not add footers inside partial feeds.

If you are on WordPress (self hosted), open the feed-rss2.php file in your WordPress wp-includes folder and add the following code:

"> - My Blog Name 

This code goes in Line 46 where just after - editing core files may not be the best approach so be careful.

This WordPress hack will add two links in the feed - one points to your blog post while the other one would point to the main blog. You can see this code in action here.