How to Prevent Content Scraping on WordPress

"Easy reading is the damn hard writing"
- Nathaniel Hawthrone

Today, with hundreds of people out there who wish to launch new sites, get popular, publish a blog, gain visibility, make some money through ads and so on. None of this is possible if you don't create unique content. As creating content takes time, some people find scraping easier than creating fresh content.

Content scraping is one of the major problems if you are producing fresh content regularly on your WordPress site or blog. Content scraping is the process of stealing original content and posting it on other sites without your consent, to make a profit. The theft is normally accomplished by using scripts or bots. Content scraping is usually done to get SEO and gain more traffic to the website. Scraping is against copyright laws, and Google does not support scraping, but it recommends you to produce unique content.

How Content Scraping Impacts your WordPress Site?

Having duplicate content on your WordPress site/blog will have a direct negative impact on SEO and your site will start ranking lower in search engine results. Scraping will directly impact legitimate traffic on your website as your users will get redirected to other platforms serving the same content. Search engines may also penalize your site for having duplicate content.

In-house Methods to Identify Web Scraping on WordPress

• Interlinking - The most important thing is to do interlinking your website URL’s within your posts, which has a lot more benefits than just scraping protection. As content scrapers do not spend much time in tweaking your content and removing the hyperlinks. So, if your blog post contains interlinks, those will then appear in your Google Webmaster Tools.


• Manual Search - Manually search for your original content in the web or search engines, search for your website URLs. This method is highly not useful, if you have written about a popular topic, you may not be able to find your blog post, or scraped content using this search approach.


• HTML file - To avoid content scraping you could create an extra HTML file, scraper.html and disallow access to this file in robots.txt file. Only scraper bots and hackers will visit this file, and you can collect their IP and block them.

However, in-house methods are mostly temporary and ineffective when it comes to detecting advanced persistent bots or scrapers. You may need a permanent solution for these problems. InfiSecure is an accurate bot protection service for WordPress platform that provides real-time protection against scraping and other automated threats.

How does Protect WordPress Websites from Bad Bots?

1. Detect - InfiSecure’s bot detection engine analyze every hit on your WordPress site in real-time and differentiate bots from human traffic.


2. Classify - Deep dive on bot traffic with an in-depth classification of bots into scraper bots, crawlers and more.


3. Block - Once scraper bots are detected, InfiSecure blocks them in real-time and provides continuous protection against bot attacks.

InfiSecure uses advanced technologies to spot content scraping bots and other automated bots. InfiSecure integrates with your website quickly and detects bots that steal content. Scraper bots get blocked before they copy your content.

InfiSecure uses the following technologies for detection and prevention of scraper bots.

• Known Violators Testing - Every hit gets tested against Proxy IPs, TOR Exit Nodes, harvesters, downloaders and other known violators.


• IP Behaviour Analysis - Our IP behavior engine processes every hit across hundreds of rules, analyses IP location, organization and other details.


• User Behaviour Analysis - InfiSecure analyzes user behavior, their website surfing patterns, mouse movements, keyboard strokes and other critical patterns.


• Device Fingerprinting - Using custom technologies, InfiSecure accurately analyzes device level data to pinpoint the source of bots.


• Centralized Intelligence - Using big data technologies across our customers, we build a centralized global intelligence to facilitate faster bot detection.


• Machine Learning Algorithms - Our machine learning algorithms create rules on the go for accurate detection of sophisticated bots.

Protect your WordPress website against content scraping and other automated threats by deploying InfiSecure’s WordPress bot protection service and safeguard your site.