7 Steps to Stop RSS Feed Scraping and Content Theft (2026 Update)

Want to stop RSS feed scraping and content theft? Scraper sites copy blog posts automatically, often straight from your RSS feed, and sometimes their copies even rank above your original article in search results. All bloggers experience RSS scraping to some extent and it is simply not possible to go after every blog with a DMCA takedown request.

Stop RSS Scraping & Content Theft

Quick answer: Add a copyright notice and links back to your site in your RSS feed, consider a summary-only feed, find copies with Google searches or Copyscape, block image hotlinking, and file DMCA takedown requests with Google and the scraper’s web host. Report scraper sites that carry ads to the ad network.

You can keep complaining, but here are some simple ways we use to deal with scraper sites engaging in your content theft.

1. Display RSS Feed Copyright Notice

To deal with sites republishing RSS, we created the Simple feed copyright WordPress plugin which adds a copyright notice as well as links back to the blog url and permalink of the post. This plugin has already been downloaded thousands of times from the official WordPress Plugins repository.

This way republished content not only gets you backlinks, but also lets Googlebot and readers of the scraper site know that the original content was from your site.

2. Find Scraped Content on Google Search

Of course the easiest way is to search for your latest post title within quotes on Google and all search results which have the same title will be detected. You can ignore the many sites which syndicate your headlines, but you MUST find the sites which republish your content.

If you want a more powerful content theft checker, I prefer to use Copyscape Premium – a useful online plagiarism finder tool for detecting copies of our web content.

3. Stop Image Hotlinking from Scraper Sites

After you find the scraped content, it is mostly not possible to stop them from republishing. So we identify the site and then see how we stop image hotlinking by these sites. You can choose to display a copyright image of your choice to replace this.

This really works as we switch hotlinked images with a bright green notice to indicate the image belongs to our site and post our short url QOT.co which is easy to type should people decide to check the original source. This works even if they decided to remove copyright notices.

See how our image messes the site of those reusing our images.

4. Show Copyright policy on Your Blog

This hardly works as most RSS scrapers hardly ever have a contact page, publicly displayed email or comment forms in which you can get a response to requests to stop RSS scraping.

If the contact form is there, you can send them the link to your copyright policy, and some scrapers might decide to remove the auto publishing bots from republishing your site, fearing lawsuit threats.

5. Report Spam to Google

If these sites rank higher, Google wants to know. This is what takes these scrapers off search engines results to the bottom of the queue. Google has this form to report spam and quality issues. You can fill this up and complain about these sites ranking higher than your site in search engine results.

Remember not to overdo the reporting and only report genuine spam. Of course you can file a DMCA request and track its progress in Google’s legal removals dashboard, which is the most effective way to get copied content removed from Google Search.

6. Stop the Site Income

Many such sites may carry Adsense ads, and if you report such Made-for-Adsense sites, Google will be happy to prevent paying advertisers from wasting their money.

Most ads carry a small AdChoices icon; click it to report problems with the ad or the site it appears on. Blocking the flow of free money makes the scraping futile with no income to justify the effort.

7. Report to Web Hosting Provider

Web hosting companies take web spam very seriously and they will take prompt action to sites hosting or engaging in illegal activities. Find webhosting company of any website and then report using the site web hosting company contact forms. They will take care of the rest, if it is a genuine request.

More ways to protect your content in 2026

• Use a summary feed: in WordPress, go to Settings → Reading and set “For each post in a feed, include” to Excerpt. Scrapers then only get a teaser with a link back to you.
• Block bad bots: services like Cloudflare can block known scraper bots and AI crawlers you don’t want, while still allowing Googlebot.
• Control AI training: add rules for tokens like Google-Extended and GPTBot in robots.txt if you don’t want AI companies using your posts for training.
• Keep internal links in posts: scraped copies carry your links back to the original, which helps Google identify the source.
• Get indexed first: keep your XML sitemap updated so Google finds your post before the copies.

Frequently asked questions

Can scraped content hurt my rankings?

Usually not. Google is good at identifying the original source and ignoring copies, but occasionally a scraper outranks you, which is when a DMCA request helps.

How do I file a DMCA takedown with Google?

Use Google’s legal removal request form, choose the copyright option and list the copied URLs and your original URLs.

Should I switch my RSS feed to excerpts?

If scraping is a big problem, yes. Full feeds are nicer for readers, so many bloggers keep them and rely on feed copyright notices instead.

Looking forward to how you deal with this in comments.