How To Protect Your Content From Being Stolen?

Content scrapers I just cannot hear this word anymore.

Think about it you spend hours to write a killer blog post only to find it on another blog hours later. Luckily the latest Google algorithm updates has now provided a way to devaluate these kinds of blogs or they could have ranked higher than your site just because they have better backlinks. But how do you protect your content from being stolen? This is what we will be looking at in this article.

Deter content theft

The first thing that you might want to do is to put a notification on your site such as “Protected by Copyscape”. Although not 100% foolproof this can have a deterring effect on content scrapers since they will know that you are monitoring your content closely.

Watermark Images

Although these watermarks can be removed by some designers it can be a real deterrent for the regular content scraper. In most cases these people will be looking for easy content that appear at their own and will not bother making changes.

Technological aid

There are various codes that you can use on your site to deter content theft. For instance there are tools that will allow you to add copyright notice in RSS feeds. This can be really effective if you want to deal with content scrapers that build an army of autoblogs to make money. There are also tools that will allow you to provide alternatives to scrapers. Instead of just copying your blog content they will be also have the choice to include a link back to your site. Example of such plugins for WordPress is: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embed-article/

How to detect stolen content?

The most useful tool is to make use of a plagiarism checker in order to detect whether your articles are found on other websites. The most famous one is Copyscape and will allow you to detect copied content within seconds. Google can also be a useful tool to find copied content. Just search for select phrases and you might be amazed at what you will find.

Courses of Action

First of all it might be a good idea that you contact the website owner. In most cases you won’t have any response especially if it is an autoblog but you never know. Sometimes people may become afraid as they have been caught and will promptly remove the plagiarized content.

In case you do not get any response you might want to contact the hosting provider. Normally hosting providers have some clear policy when it comes to copyright infringement and will immediately take corrective measures if you can prove that your content have been plagiarized.