If you are someone who has a blog, you are likely to be familiar with the very popular WordPress blogging software . I use it for my blogs and its hard to imagine a better and more flexible blogging platform.

In addition to the WordPress software that the makers provide free-of-charge, they also have a site on the web where people can sign up and create their own blogs without worrying about all the technical aspects that go along with setting up the WordPress software on your own domain. It’s one of many sites out there that allow you to sign up for your own free blog using their resources.

As I mentioned, I use the WordPress software for my blogs, and always set them up on my domains so I can have complete control of them. It allows me to make customizations and install features that would not be possible if I hosted my blogs on the WordPress.com site. The WordPress.com site is primarily for people who want to quickly set up a blog and get started without worrying about all the technical hassles.

One my my WordPress blogs is pretty popular and receives pretty decent number of visitors each day. One of the problems you take the risk of running into when you have a popular blogs is content theft. That’s when someone who is too lazy to create their own content steals the content from your blog and posts it in its entirety on their own blog, as if it were their own.

Content theft is very easy to accomplish and there really is no technical solution that prevents someone from taking content from your blog and posting in on their own. This is commonly known as "scraping."

There are, however, other methods you can employ to put these lazy bloggers out of business.

I don’t normally spend time searching around the web for content that has been stolen from my blogs, but I recently discovered that someone had been stealing my content quite by accident.

Google has a service which they call "Google Alerts." This service allows you to select a number of keywords that relate to a subject that you are interested in. Google will then periodically e-mail you news articles or web sites from around the internet that match your interests. It’s a pretty cool service, and is quite useful if you are regularly searching for new topics to write about on your blog.

I have set up a number of Google alerts that relate to the subject of my most popular blog and when I make a post on my blog that matches up with one of these alerts, I usually get an e-mail from Google Alerts with a list of sites on the web that relate to that subject, and includes a link to my blog. This might be taken as an indication that Google considers your blog or site worthy or important enough to include in it’s alerts.

Google was indexing the content of my blog (quite quickly in most cases) and then including that content in any alerts it was sending out that were related to that content. I thought that was pretty cool.

Over the last couple of weeks, I noticed that my content was not showing up very often within the Google alerts. I had not really made any significant changes to my blog or had any technical problems with it, so I was wondering if Google has lost some respect for my site.

Then one day as I was browsing through my e-mail and reading my Google Alerts, I noticed the headline of an article that I had written on my blog. The strange thing about it was that it was not listed as being an article from my blog. I clicked the link and was taken to a site that someone had set up on WordPress.com that contained the article I had written.

As if that wasn’t bed enough, Google Alerts was giving credit to a content thief who had stolen my content to use on his own site instead of giving proper credit to the original author of the article - me!

Needless to say, I was not at all happy to discover this and was determined to take action against this lazy individual who apparently has no problem stealing original content from other bloggers.

In my haste to notify the administrators of the WordPress.com site, I used their standard contact form to let them know about the content theft that a user of their service had perpetrated. I also made a comment on the offenders blog, asking him to remove my content.

Only later did I discover that WordPress.com had a dedicated page with a specific procedure for reporting content thieves that were hosting blogs on their site.

Despite the fact that I did not use the recommended procedure for reporting the problem, I received a reply from one of the administrators at WordPress.com in a short time, asking me to provide links to the original content on my site that had been stolen. I promptly e-mailed him the information he requested.

A short time later, I received and e-mail message from the same administrator who told me that they had shut the offender’s blog down and the offender would have to contact the administrators before he could get his blog back online. Sure enough, when I tried to reach that blog, I got nothing but a message telling me that the blog was disabled.

I decided to check up on it this morning and the blog had returned. All my content that I had reported to the administrators of WordPress.com had been deleted. Having not done an exhaustive search for content stolen from me previously (it may have taken hours!) I decided to do so this morning.

As I scrolled through the various pages of the blog, I did indeed find one more post that was stolen from my blog and I began to compose an e-mail message to the WordPress.com administrators to point them to stolen content that still remained.

Having reached page 15 of the blog and finding only one stolen post remaining so far, I tried to advance to page 16 and was greeted with a message that read "The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available."

My guess is that most or all of the content on that blog was stolen from other sources, and the author decided to avoid the possibility of further problems and simply shut it down. There was also evidence that the creator of that blog (I really should not refer to him as an a"author" under the circumstances) was using an automated software program to scrape content from other sites to post on his own site. Yes, these kinds of program exist and are commercially available for the lazy blogger.

The evidence that he was using automation was the large number of pages on his blog that contained duplicate posts. Some pages had the same post listed a dozen or more times. Clearly a problem with the automation software he was using to scrape content from other sites.

It’s a common thing among bloggers to share a little bit of comment. That’s what RSS feeds are for. For example, some sites use the headlines from my blog on their own sites and perhaps even a paragraph or so of the actual article. What makes that OK, is that they do it ethically, by not including the entire article and also posting a link to my blog which brings more visitors to my blog — something the aforementioned content thief was not doing.

Some of us work hard and put in a lot of time working on our blogs. In fact, the content theft would not even bother me so much if I did not see evidence that search engines like Google were giving credit to another blog for content that was stolen from my blog! That’s what really annoys me.

Anyway, the real point of this post, other than educating a few people about content theft, was to extend kudos to the staff at WordPress.com for taking very quick action and shutting down the blog of a blatant content thief. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing for some other hosting companies I have dealt with in the past when I encountered situations like this.

If you want to start a blog and don’t feel that you are tech savvy enough to set one up on your very own domain, I highly recommend WordPress.com as the place to set up your blog. They obviously have their act together and take their business and responsibilities very seriously.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Tags: blogs, content theft, scraper, wordpress.com