Stop Stealing My Content!

Posted by CIKMarketing under Online Marketing
From http://www.cikmarketing.ca 5039 days ago
Made Hot by: globalcopywrite on January 18, 2011 9:45 pm

Two tips to help you protect your blog from content thieves, including a look at the new original-source meta tag from Google.

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Comments

Written by CIKMarketing
5023 days ago

Good points everyone. It is very frustrating to put so much time and effort into quality writing to have it robbed away. You've all made valid points about the search engines' ability to find the true source, and hopefully this does occur. Sometimes it's just the fact of seeing your article plastered onto a "spam" site that is the worst.

Thanks again for all of the comments!

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Written by sherisaid
5036 days ago

It seems like every writer I know complains about theft. I am not currently writing for my own purposes (I write for clients) so I don't worry about it, but I have seen my own content reposted. This is good info, because, as the article says thieves are often stupid...and wannabe writers are not always html savvy. It will at least work some of the time, which is helpful, if not a definitive solution.

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Written by yoni67
5039 days ago

CIK,

I have had literally scores of posts and articles stolen by the unscrupulous. It is frustrating. I can Google any of my titles and find them reproduced with no credit given.

As a literary writer and a membe of the Writer's Guild I know that the only recourse is registering each and every original article as intellectual property. But at $25 per article and with the average blogger writing 100 or so posts per year, that option is not economically feasible. It would also involve legal proceedings and who has the time or money for that.

Unfortunately Cyberspace is the "public domain" and things there are based on the "honor system." Things which we work so hard to create are quite unfortunately there for the pickings!

Yoni

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Written by ShawnHessinger
5039 days ago

All good points, Alastair. I think this kind of thing is something all content creators agonize over. Here at BizSugar, keeping duplicate content from being posted is also a constant worry. The thing to remember is that thieves and content scrapers run a couple of risks: 1.) that the obvious copying, when detected by the search engines, will devalue their pages in the long run and 2.) that the originator of the content will eventually report them to Google, leading to a similar or worse scenario than the one mentioned above. The key thing to remember is that, just as the record industry discovered, there is no really effective defense against pirating in a digital age. But what thieves and pirates can never steal is your originality which gives you the ability to create fresh ideas while they are left to peddle only stale copies.

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Written by alastair
5039 days ago

Nice post and this really is a problem that's worth thinking about.

Unfortunately the two solutions mentioned are unlikely to help. Those scraping your content are unlikely to take your meta tags. Even if they were stupid enough to, they have no reason to want them so it's unlikely.

Your main defence will be the strength of your domain and being found first. The strongest signal Google can have of the original source is where it appeared first.

On the plus side, there will be many spam blogs that will intro your post and then link to it and others that will scrape the post but link to it. These also re-inforce your version as the main source and even provide some low grade link help for your search positions.

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