How hard it will be for you to see duplicated copies of your latest blog post that took you several hours to research, write and finally publish, scattered all over the Internet without giving any credit to you at all? Content being stolen from a blog is one of the most unpleasant experiences a blogger could face. Humans themselves or automated bots steal content from blogs and publish them on numerous content scraper websites all over the Internet. Most of the time, these sites are of spammy nature with hundreds of pesky ads covering the pages. Duplication of the content could harm your page ranks and website’s reputation as well; therefore you should take necessary steps to minimize content theft from your blog. The following is a comprehensive discussion on simple steps you can adapt to protect the content of your blog posts.
Inclusion of Copyright Notices :
Typically the original content you publish on your blog belongs to you. Therefore you get to decide what the viewers are authorized to do with your content. The easiest and most convenient way to inform them about what they are allowed and not allowed to do is placing a proper copyright notice at a visible spot on your blog, such as in a sidebar. If you are using copyrighted materials from others in your blog the right way, indicate those owners’ copyrights and credits to them as well.
In your copyright notice you can tell the viewers what they are allowed to do and the conditions applied. For instance you can allow viewers to share your blog content as-is or derive content based upon your work. You can define the conditions they must adhere to, in order to legally use your content, such as that they are bound to provide due credit to you and a follow back link to your own blog in their posts, whether they are allowed to use your work for commercial purposes or whether they need your explicit permission to use your content elsewhere. You can also license your work under a Creative Common license which too indicates what the viewers are allowed and not. If you find someone violating your copyrights you can first ask them to take down the content, and if they don’t you have the right to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice. Inclusion of a copyright notice doesn’t guarantee that your content won’t be stolen or plagiarized, as it is entirely up to the visitors, however it is always good to remind them that you are serious about content theft.
Protecting Images and Documents :
If you use your own copyrighted images and documents on your blog, you can follow several steps to minimize copying of your images and documents by others. Although it is not a guarantee that your content won’t be copied, embedding a watermark in your images and documents is a good way to claim your rights. Using image processing software like Adobe Photoshop, or a word processing software you can add your own watermarks for the content and this serves as a warning sign for those who try to copy your content. Also you can implement JavaScript to disable right-click functionality on your blog so that users won’t be able to right-click and save images the way they are used to. WordPress users too can make use of numerous plug-in s to protect the content on your blog. Slicing your images, using Flash to display images too helps you protect your images from being copied.
Searching for Plagiarized Content :
No matter how hard you try, plagiarism does happen. Your content gets stolen and published elsewhere without you knowing it. The interesting fact is that most of the time it is not the actual humans copying and pasting the content. These are carried out by specially designed automated bots. So, without you knowing it your blog’s content gets copied and published on other sites coated with pesky advertisements and very poor reputations. You can get a lot of free plagiarism checker tool online but i have listed the best plagiarism checker tool online in my blog. Most of the time the owners of these types of sites do not care or do not know what is being copied or published as long as they have content to fill up pages and make truces with search engine bots. Therefore it is your duty to keep an eye on any possible duplicates of your content. You can use an online plagiarism checking tool such as Copyscape, set up Google Alerts for your blog name or title to track down unauthorized duplicates of your content. If you find possible duplicates you can inform the site owners, and even file a complaint at Google requesting to de-index the duplicate content. In case of copyrighted images you can also use the sophisticated search by image feature in Google Image search.
Conclusion :
Original content is what makes a blog go all the way to the top spot in search engine result pages. Search engine bots love original content, and they do hate to see duplicated and plagiarized content. While original content is rewarded, plagiarized content is blacklisted. If your content gets plagiarized it would in turn harm your search engine rankings, earnings and reputation, therefore you should take precautionary steps to prevent your content from being stolen. Simple tactics such as inclusion of copyright notices, watermarking images and documents help you claim your rights to the content and inform others how to and how not to use them elsewhere. However since the browsers download everything on a webpage for displaying it on the screens it should be noted that it is still possible to copy the content from your site no matter what you do. After all it is the internet. There are numerous tools available online both for free and as paid services to detect stolen and plagiarized content. You can keep track on your blog posts using these automated services. Once you’ve come across a duplicated copy you can inform the site owner of the materials and ask them to remove it. If they do not respond to you, you can file complaints at Google for de-indexing those duplicated sites, and if you are super serious you can file a DMCA complaint. It is your own hard work, so it’s your duty to take necessary steps to protect them.
