Content theft can boost your rankings

A quick tip. Syndicated content is ridiculously easy to reuse and repackage, making it perfect for automated content generation schemes. Take a few RSS feeds (from blogs like this one), parse out the individual entries, slap a page template (with ad code, of course) around each entry and then publish the new page to your own site and voila, instant site! Any competent (or semi-competent) programmer can write a program to do this in a weekend, and for those who don't have the skill or inclination to do so there are several software packages available for purchase that do it for you.

So what's a blogger (or anyone syndicating content — bloggers are just the biggest and most obvious group) supposed to do about this? Here are common tactics:

• Don't syndicate any content. Yep, no feeds. Drastic, because it forces people to visit your site to read what you have to say. Few people can get away with this.
• Syndicate summaries. Don't make your full content available from the feed, only a summary. This still forces people to visit your site to read the full content, but at least they can do it from within their feed reader. Of course, your summary (and title) better be compelling enough to make them do this.
• Ban the thieves. Track the people using your content and ban them from getting your feed. Lots of work, and not always possible to do.

Or you could view content theft as an opportunity to spread the word about your blog/site. Make the thieves your unwilling accomplices in this. How? Simple: put a link back to your site in every posting you make. Yes, the feed has a link back to your site in it, but I'm talking about embedding links right in the content. You can do it quite easily via a short “bio” at the bottom of each posting, like I do (see below). Or strategically within the content itself, if appropriate.

This won't catch all the thieves, of course. Some of them strip links from content. There's nothing you can do about that, other than perhaps make sure you entries are peppered with enough links to make them only semi-useful without them. But the thieves that leave the links in place will end up helping you in the long run. Remember, one-way links are valuable and your own rankings can't be hurt by an independent site linking to yours.

My advice is to not worry much about content theft. After all, if what you're writing is so valuable, why aren't you charging for it in the first place? That's when you should worry about content theft. But if you're putting it out free, expect it to be reprinted and plan accordingly. There are more important things to worry about.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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