The Problem

“Web scraping (or Web harvesting, Web data extraction) is a computer technique of extracting information from websites using specially coded software programs” (Wikipedia), which can harvest your whole blog and steal your content. Whilst it may be credited to you on these scraper sites, it will still be indexed by Search Engines and to the ‘novice’ web user might mislead them as their own content. Here is a quick tip that takes minutes to set-up and might help you detect any problems as they arise:

A great quick, easy and powerful tool is Google Alerts, which can keep you up to date with new listings periodically or on a ‘as-it-happens’ basis. This gives us power to alert the use of a brand, company or personal name and for us to review the suitability and take any actions.

Setting up your alert

• Visit Google Alerts: www.google.com/alerts (opens in a new window).
• Enter your search term, such as your company name. You can also include multiple words in speech marks to search for the entire phrase and reduce false alerts e.g. “My Test Company”. It allows multiple alerts and you can make the search more advanced, such as the use of site: (e.g. ‘site:www.mysite.co.uk’) to restrict the alert to a particular website or combined with the - (minus symbol) to remove a site.
• You can also set the type of search (Comprehensive, News, Blogs etc…) and the frequency of the alert (as-it-happens, once a day or once a week), which may be useful if your company name is similar to others or the level of alerts are substantial.

You should now be receiving emails as new pages list with your name included and the page details, so you can check occasions of sites using your content without permission.

Edit: 28/01/09

Even after a request to remove my site form theirs, ironically this article turned up on their site. I take much effort to preserve the company name and image, and would rather my content stayed where it belonged. I won’t link to it to give them an ounce of benefit, but if can be found here: http://www.jd-web-publishing.com/2009/01/20/realising-designs-articles-%C2%BB-keeping-control-of-your-content/