If you read my blog via a Feed reader, you might have encountered a strange part at the beginning of each post: [This content belongs to rothemund.org – fingerprint:xxxxxxxxxx]. This is part of the wordpress plugin “Digital Fingerprint“. What is it for?
There are many blogs out there that just display other peoples content via RSS and put some Google Adsense on it to make money with the stolen content. Not that I consider my content that important, but I just can not accept that someone uses my content for spam websites and additionally makes money with that.
So I found this nice plugin and thought I might give it a try. It inserts a unique fingerprint in the RSS feeds which can be searched for by any search engine. You have to pick a unique fingerprint (no matches in Google & Co so far) and when it appears somewhere on the web you can be almost sure that someone is including your content on his website via RSS.
To avoid unnecessary appearance of my fingerprint in the search indices I have substituted it above by xxxxxxxxxx (You can see my fingerprint in the RSS feeds if you really need to).