Spammers and blackhatters often take other bloggers RSS feeds as well as various RSS Feed Aggregators whoch show the full content of feeds submitted which eventually overtakes ranking in search engines from original content.

Now you can stop these content thefts through your RSS feeds. Here are some tips and suggestions which you can follow for your blog (or websites in general)

1. Do not publish Full RSS Feed - if you have a new blog, say less then 6 months old, its a big mistake to publish full feed as the chances are someone will take it and will out rank you because his site is more authority.

2. Use custom message in your rss feed like Copyright message or the feed belongs to this website or do not steal the content of this site etc. You can use this plugin to get custom footer copyright messages in your wordpresss blog feeds. If you are using other CMS or blogging platform, you need to check the plugin repository for them. I know drupal and joomla has similar plugins, so most likely others too will be having it.

3. You can use Related Links plugin in wordpress to show related links of your blog and website at the bottom. Now when someone takes your rss feeds, these links will also be shown on his site too. Most often content thiefs do not take such feeds which shows related links at the bottom. For other CMS and blogging platform, check the plugin repository for them.

4. You can File DMCA complaint to Google - If doing the first 3 steps still don’t stop your content theft and then you can send mail to the host saying that they are stealing your copyrighted content and you will take legal action. Most often hosts do warn the person but many blackhatters and content stealers own their own hosting company and dedicated server or may be there is no whois information for the website which is taking your content, in that case, you can also contact Google and file a DMCA complaint and ask google to remove copied content from its index. Do note that this is lengthy process as you need to prove that you are the original owner of content and need to fax documents to google.

5. Another good advice to stop content theft is to heavily interlink your posts, so whenever someone steals your content through RSS feed, you atleast get a dofollow backlink from that blog.

Google is very good in finding content thefts and giving credit to original content so most likely you don’t have to worry about that much anyway, just be patient as blogs and sites which steal content are temporary and often dies in few months. In the mean time, you can keep adding high quality content and get strong links to make yourself better.

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