Content Scraping Protection

Content scraping is the automated copying of text from a website for republication on other sites. For SEO, this is problematic because duplicate content can confuse Google about which site is the original source, and in some cases, the scraper site can outrank the original (especially if its domain is more authoritative). Protections include self-referencing canonical tags, DMCA takedown requests to Google to remove copies, server-side rate limiting, CAPTCHAs for suspicious bots, monitoring with Copyscape or Google Alerts, adding internal links within content (which get copied too, linking back to your site), and image watermarking. Google has also improved its ability to identify original content through the Panda algorithm and Search Console reporting.