It is not uncommon to find websites who republish RSS feeds of other blogs without permission. Why they do this is anyone’s guess but as a content owner, this is something to worry about especially when you publish full feeds.

That’s because when duplicate copies of your articles exist elsewhere on the web, some search engines may have trouble finding out the true source. What if Googlebot discovers the repulished article before stumbling across the original article on your website?

So how do you deal with such web content scrapers?

Well, you can either take the legal route with the help of Google Docs or try something simple - just add a link to your original article somewhere in the RSS feed. When search engine see this link, they’ll instantly know the real source. The other advantage is that since the spam blog is republishing your RSS feed, they are also linking to your website and thus indirectly helping you improve your own search rankings.

If you are on Blogger, open your blog dashboard and go to Settings -> Site Feed. In the Post Feed Footer, add the following code:

<hr />
<a href="http://www.myblog.com">My Blog Name</a>

This will add a link to your main blog at the bottom of every article in the RSS feed. For this to work, you should be syndicated full feeds as Blogger would add not add footers inside partial feeds.

If you are on WordPress (self hosted), open the functions.php file of your WordPress blog theme and add the following code:

function embed_rss($content) {
  if(is_feed())
     $content .= "<p><a href='". get_permalink() ."'>'";
     $content .= get_the_title() ."</a></p>";
  return $content;
  }
add_filter('the_content', 'embed_rss');

This WordPress hack will add two links in the feed - one points to your blog post while the other one would point to the main blog. You can see this code in action here.