How to prevent scraping my blog's updates? - wordpress

Question

I have a self-hosted wordpress blog, and as almost expected, I found there's another blog scraping my contents, posting a perfect copy of my own posts (texts, images not hotlinked but fetched and reupped to the clone's server, html layout within the posts) with a few hours of delay.
however I must confess I'm infuriated to see that when I search Google for keywords relevant to my posts, the scraping clone always comes first.
So, here I am, open for suggestions, would you know how to prevent my site from being successfully scraped ?
Technical precisions :
the clone blog appears to be self-hosted, and so am I, I'm on a debian+webmin+virtualmin dedi
my RSS feed is already cut with a "read more on" halfway. Hey, I just thought I should publish a post while assigning it a date like 2001-01-01, and see if it appears on the clone blog, that would allow to know if my RSS is still used as a signal for "hey, it's scraping time !"
my logs can't find the scraper among legit traffic, either it's non-identifiable or else it's lost among the flood of legit traffic
I already htaccess-banned and iptables-banned the .com domain of the clone, my contents are still cloned nonetheless
the clone website makes use of reverse proxies, so I can't trace where it is hosted and what actual IPs should be blocked (well, unless I iptables-ignore-ban half of Europe to ban the whole IP ranges of its data storage facility, but I'm slightly reluctant to that !)
I'm confident this isn't hand-made, the cloning has been running for two years now, every day without fail
only my new posts are cloned, not the rest of my website (not the sidebars, not the wordpress pages as opposed to wordpress posts, not the single pages), so setting up a jail.html to log who opens it page won't work, no honey-potting
when my posts contain internal links pointing to another page of my website, the posts on the clone won't be rewritten and will still point to my own website
I'd love help and suggestions with this issue. Not being cloned, but losing traffic to that bot while I'm the original publisher.

Answer 1

You can't really stop them in the end, but you might be able to find them and mess with them. Try hiding the request IP in an HTML comment, or white-on-white text, or just somewhere out of the way, then see what IPs show up on the copies. You can also try to obfuscate that text if you want by turning it into a hex string or something so it's less obvious to someone who doesn't know or make it look like an error code, just so they don't catch on to what you're doing.
In the end, though, I'm not sure how much it will buy you. If they're really inattentive, rather than shutting them down and calling attention to the fact that you're onto them, you can feed them gibberish or whatever whenever one of their IPs crops up. That might be fun and it's not too hard to make a gibberish generator by putting sample texts into a Markov chain.
EDIT: Oh, and if pages aren't rewritten too much, you might be able to add some inline JS to make them link to you, if they don't strip that. Say, a banner that only shows up if they're not at your site, giving the original link to your articles and suggesting that people read that.

Answer 2

Are you willing to shut down your RSS Feed? if so you could do something like
function fb_disable_feed() {
wp_die( __('No feed available,please visit our homepage!') );
}
add_action('do_feed', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
it means if you go to a feed page, it just returns with the message in wp_die() on line two. We use it for 'free' versions of our WP Software with an if-statement so they can't hook into their RSS feeds to link to their main website, it's an upsell opportunity for us, it works well is my point, haha.

Answer 3

Even though this is a little old of a post, I thought it would still be helpful for me to weigh in in case other people see the post and have the same question. Since you've eliminated the RSS feed from the mix and youre pretty confident it isnt a manual effort, then what you need to is better stop the bots they are using.
First, I would recommend banning proxy servers in your IPTables. You can get a list of known proxy server addresses from Maxmind. This should limit their ability to anonymize themselves.
Second, it would be great to make it harder for them to scrape. You could accomplish this in one of a couple of ways. You could render part, or all of your site in javascript. If nothing else, you could at least just render the links in javascript. This will make it significantly harder for them to scrape you. Alternatively, you can put your content within an iframe inside the pages. This will also make it somewhat harder to crawl and scrape.
All this said, if they really want your content they will pretty easily get by these traps. Honestly, fighting off webscrapers is an arms race. You cannot put any static trap in place to stop them, instead you have to continuously evolve your tactics.
For full disclosure, I am a co-founder of Distil Networks, and we offer an anti-scraping solution as a service.