Because it’s so easy to start making money with AdSense and similar services, many less scrupulous people figure that, if they can create thousands - or hundreds of thousands - of pages, and put ads in them, they will probably get some traffic from search engines, which, multiplied by the thousands of pages they have, should make them a lot of money.
Now, how do they get so many pages quickly and without actual work? By stealing content - mostly from feeds. By using some simple scripts to read from hundreds and hundreds of feeds, and generate web pages from them, they can get those hundreds of thousands of pages, almost instantly, and with no real effort at all.
Fortunately, search engines like Google don’t like repeated content, and their algorithms include figuring out which is the “original source” for any particular piece of content. That helps reduce the effectiveness of the “automated content” pages, since Google should always - or almost always - make the original pages appear first, in search results.
Still, there are some things you, as a blogger, can do in order to punish content stealers even more, by making it obvious that 1) their content is stolen, and 2) it’s stolen from you. Here are some possibilities:
- Link internally - when posting about a particular subject, mention (and link to) a previous, related post of yours. The stealers’ scripts will almost surely keep those links intact. This has other advantages, too, both in terms of SEO, and in terms of making readers stay longer on your blog (see? :)).
- Add a copyright notice - either just in the feed, or in the actual posts as well. For instance, by using Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin for WordPress, you get such a notice (which includes a link to your blog) added automatically to every post in your feed (though I had to make some changes to the plugin for it to work perfectly with FeedBurner).
- Provide excerpts only - it helps, surely, by making your feeds useless to content stealers, and can also increase traffic to your blog, as people can no longer read everything you write in their aggregators. However, I think this is “evil”; I don’t read excerpt feeds myself (not practical, IMO), and don’t want to force them on others either; therefore I use full feeds. I won’t be forced by content-stealing scum into crippling my own blogs.
Note that I don’t suggest actually complaining to the content stealers. It probably won’t work (unless you have some lawyers behind you), and it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.
Using some kind of Apache rules or firewall rules can also work case-by-case, but, again, it’s too much work, and forces you to “chase” the stealers. Besides, you can’t do it if you use FeedBurner.
Myself, I use the first method, and will be adopting the second one as well in the near future (one blog already uses it). With this, it becomes obvious both to readers and to search engines where the articles really come from… and, incidentally, it also makes every stolen post link to me. 
Sure, the content stealer could perhaps program their scripts to try to remove copyright messages… but that’s probably more work than they are prepared to do, considering the fact that they probably steal from hundreds of feeds at the same time. It’s only worthwhile for them if then can do all the work automatically… and this makes it harder. Either they will just stop stealing your feeds, or they will ignore it and display your copyright messages and links to your blog in every single post.
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Thank you for posting this - I had no idea that this was a common thing. It’s a pity that people will try anything (even if unethical) for a buck.
I was curious to know about the changes you had to make to Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin for WordPress to make it work correctly with Feedburner? BTW, I just saw the plugin in use on one of the feeds I subscribe to that is distributed via Feedburner, so I’m not sure if the latest version already has Feedburner compatibility built in — yet any help would be greatly appreciated!