There are a lot of aggregator style sites and most pull off of a blogs RSS feed. There is really no way to prevent somebody from using your RSS feed because you are providing it on your site but if somebody is publishing your RSS in a way you do not like, you can clearly ask them to stop.
One thing many blog owners with RSS feeds may not know is that your RSS feed may be delivering your FULL articles to these sites.
The problem with this is that those that use the service pulling your feed, never have to leave that site to read your content!
You may not even be aware that this was case!
So how do you change your RSS feed in WordPress to only show a teaser (summary) of your article instead of the full deal?
In WordPress backend, go to
Settings > Reading
Look for For each article in a feed, show = Select Summary and click Save Changes and then it will only show a partial of the article being pulled and the user on the aggregator site will need to click your title to read the rest of the article. This forces the user to visit your site directly as they should if they wish to read the full article.
I think a lot of people are not aware of that setting and it can have devastating results if people never have to visit your site due to an aggregator style site pulling your RSS feed and you having the full article displaying!
steve
omg, if you have an rss feed and they are abusing it. If they have google adsense report them to google to get their adsense account banned.
Mike Sullivan
Thanks for the tip. I looked at that during my initial setup and then never went back to correct it.
Jamie Zoch
Sure thing Mike and glad I could bring a spotlight on it. I’m sure many site owners miss this and may be displaying full articles on “other” sites not even knowing it.
Kevin M
I have a couple of jerks who’ve been ripping off my blog almost since I started it.
It’s a tough call. You’ve also got to consider how your genuine readers want to access your posts.