Yesterday I wrote a post titled When Has Stealing Content Gone to Far?   At the time of publishing that post, I wasn’t really sure how it would be received because of the subject matter.   So far all feedback has been pretty positive, so I decided to write a quick follow up post talking about how to deal with getting your content stolen.  Thanks to Laurence for the idea.

As most people should know, when you publish content, pictures, or whatever else on the internet, there is always some risk that things will get scraped or stolen completely from your website/blog.  Despite everything falling under copyright protection, people sometimes get away with it because it is often difficult to enforce. 

So, what can do you to deal with content theft?  Here are two things readers suggested that may help:

1. Terms and Conditions - Create a clear terms and condition policy that is findable on your website.   It may not help, but it certainly can’t hurt anything.   Throw it in the footer of your blog or somewhere that it is accessible. 
2. Use Internal Links in your Posts - In addition to the SEO benefits of working on your internal linking structure, scraped and sometimes stolen content will often include these links back to your website.  

Hopefully those methods will help avoid this in the future, but what can you do when your content has already been stolen? 

1. Contact the Offender - Depending on the situation, some sites may have a contact form or some way to contact the thief.   You can also try checking the domain whois records.  This is a good way to request they delete your stolen content and stop stealing your content in the future.   Though most know they are doing so, a few might not be aware that this is illegal.
2. Take Action Against the Offender - If the first option doesn’t yield any results or there is no way to contact the owner, there are two ways to take action against the thief.   If they use Google AdSense to monetize the site (most do), you can report them to Google by clicking on the “Ads by Google” link in the lower right corner of the AdSense box and provide them feedback.  I believe stolen content is actually one of the default options you can check.   The other thing you can do is contact the hosting company and let them know they are hosting websites that are doing illegal practices.  I’ve heard of people have some success going this route, so it is a great last resort. 

So, that is what I have.   What do you do to deal with scrapers and content thiefs?

P.S.  Ironically enough, unless there is some sort of screening process that I’m not aware of, this post will be scraped at least 3 times shortly after publication.   Am I the only one that finds humor in that?

This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, a 13 year old programmer and web developer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I absolutely love the i3 WordPress theme. I used it for my site for about a month, and I had no problems for what I needed. It features a “mac” look, has the Mac OS X classic background that fades into the mac’s “spotlight blue”. The sidebars are on the left and right side not attached to the middle content. The separate widgets are each in their own little bubble with a mac like toolbar as the header. The theme displays the pages in the middle content column, and this is one of the very rare themes that display the sub-pages very nicely under the page parent. Also you can move around the columns to your liking, so instead of the content being in the middle you can have it off to the right and the sidebars on the left, and vice versa.

If you are on the photos section it would display a small little bar under the pages bar displaying the sub pages, but if you are on the home page it will not display these sub pages. It has a built-in search bar in the top right hand corner, and it looks like the spotlight application in Mac OS X 10.4 and higher, except its black. The only problem I’ve ever had with it is displaying javascript in sidebar, ad- sense would fine, but a simple javascript code would make the sidebar screw up and shift to the bottom of the page. I switched themes because of that and because it is a very popular theme, and I like to switch up my theme every once in a while.

I highly recommend using this theme if you can’t find a better theme for yourself. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!

If your blog has over 100 subscribers on it, it is pretty likely that your blog is probably getting scraped, as they seem to be everywhere anymore.   Hack WordPress currently has 3 blogs scraping its content every time we publish a post, so we’ve become pretty familiar with them.   But that is not actually what I’m referring to when I came up with the title of this post.

What I’m talking about are people that manually reprint an entire post on their “legitimate” blogs.  One blog that has been doing this to me (and I assume others) is a blog called WordPress Collection dot com.  The link was intentionally left out.

The two most recent posts (as of publishing this post) are identical copies of two posts in our archives.  Here are our posts:

• How To: Display the Recent Posts of Specific Categories
• How To: Prevent Google from Indexing Your Images

Now, to be fair, I fully understand when dealing with code that it really doesn’t change, so I have no problem with someone taking one of our code hacks, or someone else’s posts, and publishing it on their blog.  We have done this on occasion, but we always have a fresh post where only the code is the same, and we link to the source.   Unfortunately with this site, it uses the exact same title and exact same content as our posts, word for word.   The only thing I could find changed is the permalink in the code, which was switched to the permalink of their blog.

So, when does content theft go to far?  I’ve never liked scrapers but I have learned to live with them.  They usually only reprint a excerpt of the post and link to the source.  This, however, is going to far in my opinion.   At least change the wording around the code and link to the source.  As a result, this website has been added to my blacklist of sites I don’t visit or link to, etc.

I’ve seen people mention contacting their web hosting as a good method to deal with content theft when something like this gets out of hand.   What methods have you used to deal with content theft?

If you take a step back and look at the successful premium WordPress themes available today, the first thing you’ll notice is that they offer much more than the standard blogging template that most free WordPress themes offer.  You’ll find magazine themes, news themes, video themes, social networking themes, and all sorts of other themes that are designed to function as content management systems.  

In looking at the future of WordPress, my hope is that the standard build of WordPress will continue to grow and many WordPress plugins will fill the gaps to make a fully functional content management system. 

Recently BloggingPro did a great job of showing the versatility of WordPress with their post showing 7 different ways to use WordPress.  In their post, they highlight these 7 ways you can use WordPress:

1. Blogging
2. Photoblog
3. Tumblelog
4. Magazine
5. Online Shop
6. Contact Manager and Customer Relations Management
7. Twitter Platform

Click over to see the examples of each!  

I personally use WordPress for most of my content sites, including several static sites, a tumblelog, and of course several blogs.   Its versatility is amazing.   In what unique ways have you used WordPress?

This guest post was written by Leland of Theme Lab, where he has released over 50 WordPress themes. In addition to themes, Theme Lab also provides some WordPress guides. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

In this guide you’ll learn how to display Adsense on just your first post within the Loop. Sure, there may be plugins that will do this for you. This guide, however, will use code examples to accomplish the same thing by editing your WordPress theme.

The first step is to open up your index.php file in your theme editor. Find the following line:

<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>

Just above that, insert the following like this:

<?php $i = 1; ?>
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>

Now, scroll down a bit until you find this line:

<?php endwhile; ?>

Insert the following above it, like so:

<?php $i++; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

The final step is to insert your Adsense code. Locate where exactly you’d like it within the Loop, and place it between a conditional tag like this:

<?php if ($i == 1) { ?> [YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE] <?php } ?>

And that’s all you have to do. You can be creative with this code as well. You could add a certain css style class to the top post in your Loop. It doesn’t even have to be the first either, as you can just change the number in $i == 1 to whatever you want. This same method can be used in other archive templates such as archive.php.

You can display ads with WordPress in other ways as well, including plugins such as WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin (formerly Shylock Adsense).