With more and more blog scrapers being used to create splogs (definition), it’s important to take steps to protect original content on your business blog.

When your hard work and original articles appear elsewhere, it can do serious damage to you, your reputation, and your search engine ranking.

In this two-part article I’ll share six simple steps you can take to:

• stop the theft of your business blog content
• protect your reputation
• and guard your search engine rankings

Plus I’ll share two low cost legal responses you can take it that protection is violated.

The buzz about blog content theft

This morning as I was scanning my FeedDemon categories before heading out to Sunset beach, I saw what has to be about the 30th post I’ve read on content theft and copyright violation in the last month. The one I read today was by Ausie blogger Yaro Starak.

Content theft and copyright infringement on the web is a topic that’s becoming more serious with each passing week. It may not be a major issue for personal users, but the ramifications for business owners can be dire. Since we’ve given our business blog coaching clients detailed answers on how to deal with the growing problem. And since the authors in the special course we’re doing for our New York publisher Morgan James, have gotten even more customized solutions — I thought it would be good to share six GENERAL steps as guidelines.

Why am I emphasizing “general”?

I only mention this because we really are entering into a legal realm here. How far you go with (or beyond) any of the steps below will vary based on your business, your blog strategy, and what the intended end-use of your blog content is. I’m not an attorney,and I don’t even play one on television — so if you’re using your business blog to market, author a book, or create a product — invest a few hundred bucks and talk to an attorney.

OK, now that we’ve got the out of the way.

Before we get to the six steps, let’s make sure it’s clear why blog content theft and copyright infringement can quickly become a serious problem for you and your business.

How the theft of your blog content can damage you and your business

The majority of the content theft is not being done by human beings. It’s being done with software called “blog scrapers.” Lazy, back-alley marketers looking to make money off AdSense and other pay-per-click type advertising use this software to scrape content off blogs and place it on their software generated splog.

Sometimes they scrape your entire post, including your authors tag and a link back to your site. Many times though, they steal just the portion of the content that is keyword relevant to their splog topic. The more advanced offenders in this content theft use this technique because it increases the keyword relevancy of their slog, without creating any outbound links which would reduce their search engine ranking.

Before I learned how damaging this content theft can be (from a good friend who’s a top organic search engine ranking expert,) we didn’t think much of the content theft it as we saw it happening. We used to provide full feeds figuring “how could it hurt?”

Well … the fact is that if the duplicate content if it gets bad enough WILL impact your SEO, both directly and indirectly. Directly due to the duplicate content verbatim. Indirectly, in cases where scraped content does not include a link back to your site, it’s actually increasing competition for your targeted keywords.

In addition — even if there are links going back to your domain — in most cases the referring sites are not relevant to your topic so the inbound link has little to no positive impact on your ranking.

Plus, just as importantly, some of the sites where your scrapped content appears can be damaging to your reputation. We’ve had scraped content appear on sites with references to pornography and other junk we don’t want to be associated with.

Six simple steps to stop thieves from stealing your content

So now that you know some of the dangers, let’s get you started with six simple steps you can take to start protecting your business, your blog content, and your reputation. I’ve divided them into proactive and reactive action steps.

Three proactive steps

#1. Include a strongly worded copyright tag

The bottom of each of your original content posts/articles should include a brief copyright tag. this is your first line of defense. This will prevent all but the most unscrupulous of people from stealing your content. As far as the blog scraping software that spam marketers use, it won’t do much on the prevention side. BUT — it is the only thing that gives you the legal right to go after the offending party.

A Creative Commons copyright does not have enough ‘teeth’ legally. If it’s important for you to protect your content, include a copyright that is cannot be seen as ambiguous.

An example of the copyright tag that we use to protect creative content on this blog is:

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. All full copyright rights are reserved by RPM Success Group inc. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

#2. Use a summary feed for your business blog

Now, some blogging evangelists may disagree with this suggestion. But you’ll have to forgive me. Here at advanced business blogging we’re about helping business owners, sales professionals, and marketers master the New Media Marketplace. That starts with business blogs, and for the majority of our audience and clients, summary feeds make sense.

Besides if you look at many of the highest traffic (political) blogs, they use summary feeds to protect against blog scraping, dilution of their content, and degradation of their search engine rankings.

Opponents of summary feeds use as their main argument the opinion that summary feeds “inconvenience readers.” That a subscriber or reader has to take an extra step to get to your content.

My first thought when I hear that is — if people not clicking through is a major concern, you need help with your headlines and opening paragraph! Even if you have the full text of your post published in your RSS feed, that’s all the vast majority of people are reading before they decide to read the entire article anyway. Good copy writing along with good content is important for marketing with your blog and other new media. There is no getting around that!

My second thought when I hear the ‘anti-summary feed’ argument is — what kind of RSS reader are you using? FeedDemon, NewsGator, and practically every other for-fee RSS reader provides one click crossover to the actual Blogs site. In most cases that’s done without even leaving the RSS reader. So what is so inconvenient about that?!

#3 If you ‘must’ use a full text feed — copyright protect it!

There may be where you’re required to supply a full text RSS feed for some type of marketing or strategic partnership. Or maybe using a summary feed just doesn’t work for you. Either way, if you’re using a full text feed, for God’s sake — copyright protect your it!

If you’re using WordPress to run your business blog, this is a snap. Angsuman over at Simple Thoughts has developed a plugin that will automatically add a copyright tag to your feed for you. It inserts a copyright in your RSS feed like this:

Copyright © 2006 Advanced Business Blogging. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@advancedbusinessblogging.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Once the WordPress plugin is installed on your blog, “Advanced Business Blogging” in the above example would be automatically replaced by your blog name. The URL will be your blog URL. The email address will be legal@YOUR_SERVER_NAME.

What to do if you content is still stolen

Invariably, even when you take the three steps suggested above, you’ll have to take some kind of reactive action to protect yourself. In most cases, you won’t have to go beyond the first two of the three levels of ‘reactive’ action we suggest. And they’re really quite simple.

There are important legal issues I’ll cover in the next three actions. And since I’ve gone so long already, I want to be sure I have enough time to go over them in detail for you. I’ll cover these in part 2 of this article.

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. All full copyright rights are reserved by RPM Success Group inc. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing and online persuasion power of blogs, podcasts, and other New Media at Advanced Business Blogging (http://www.advancedbusinessblogging.com)