Stopping Content Theft
In my previous post entitled “Spimmers,” I mentioned resources that would help bloggers protect their original content thru WordPress plugins and included links to pages that outline ways on how to deal with spimmers once they are found out. In addition to those resources, Lorelle on WordPress has written a very nice article about the best tips in dealing with spimmers or scrapers. One of them is another plugin that not only prevents content theft but generates fake content so that the reader visiting a scraper’s site is also informed that the site they visited might be leeching off of other people’s work. This is what Antileech is all about.
Antileech is a WordPress plugin that was developed by Owen Winkler and was designed to stop splogs (spam blogs) from leeching off of original content publishers.
AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
This works by checking what the visitor’s User-Agent is using. A User-Agent, to my understanding, is the application used to access your content, usually a browser. Of course, there is a risk of restricting all User-Agents to get fake content. However, if in doubt, just leave the options blank and use the default settings.
This plugin further enhancees your content’s security, especially when used alongside the Digital Fingerprint plugin.
So what are you doing to protect your original content?
First off, thank you for drawing more attention to this issue.
To clarify a bit about Antileech, the User-Agent is how the bot identifies itself. For example, your browser, when it visits a site, identifies itself as IE, Firefox or what have you. Similarly, spiders and bots identify themselves when they visit a page, Google Spider has one User-Agent Strong and Yahoo’s has another.
The problem is that the bad guys frequently lie about who they are in that string. They can pretend to be something made up or even mask themselves as Google or a Web browser. If they do that, you can’t block them without blocking legitimate use.
This isn’t to say that Antileech is a waste, I don’t think it is, just that it has limitations.
As far as what I am doing, extreme vigilance and taking down those who do steal. It’s what I’m good at.
Thank you again for drawing attention to this!