RSS content scrapers will republish your full text feed, but you can get free back links from these republished posts easily. It is very important to let search engines know that the original content was from your site.
Auto blogs and RSS content scrapers usually republish your full text feed, so if you have interspersed links pointing to deeper content on your site, it will help to get links from the scraper site to your site. But very often we forget to insert deep links to our site from every article, mostly because there is a trend to publish related links at the end of the article. But the republished article will not post these related links.
While we all stop image hotlinking to let visitors know that this was scraped content, we can do better by posting links to the original article in the RSS feed.
Free back links from scraped content
It as a good idea to insert links in the RSS feed pointing to the original article, as well as paste a copyright notice pointing to the original blog. This is how a copyright notice with back links appeared at the end of the previous article in our full-text RSS feed.
For one it is a good idea to publish a copyright notice, as it also gets republished with the content and highlights the source of the original content. But a link back to the original article has even more advantage, as it helps the search engines spiders to understand this duplicate content issue. There are back links to the original content – so it helps search engines realise that yours was the original content, which will help your original article get better search engine rankings over the scraper site.
How to insert back links into RSS feed
Earlier I used to edit the feed-rss2.php file in my WordPress installation, but it used to be overwritten when WordPress upgrades were done automatically. So what is the easiest way to get back links in your full text RSS feed to your original article?
A few years back we created our own Simple Feed Copyright WordPress plugin (which we recently updated), so that it will insert a back link to your original article as well as add a copyright notice beneath each article. This plugin has already been downloaded more than 13,000 times from the official WordPress plugin directory, and you can try it on your blog too.
It is difficult to stop RSS content scrapers, but why not get free back links and keep your content ranking higher in search engines results with this simple tip.