Thwarting Content Theft
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Not long ago I found several complete articles I wrote online – on someone else’s web site. We didn’t grant permission to republish those articles. If you’ve experienced the same problem with your original work, you’ll want to keep reading. Content theft is no minor issue.
The most typical form of content theft happens when the thief sends a scraper bot to grab original articles from web sites, and then throws a bunch of them together onto a single site. The thief then sets up the site to make money from AdSense. If you’re a blogger, and you don’t make money from your content, this can be particularly infuriating.
The thief may or may not realize that the search engines penalize sites for duplicate content. So he may be penalized – or he may not be. Search engines can’t tell who published an article first. And content thieves often work very fast; I’ve seen articles I’ve written published in full on other sites within a week or two of their going live here. So it’s entirely possible that you will suffer an unjustified penalty for content you created!
Fortunately, you don’t have to live with this problem. You can not only detect content theft, you can also make the brazen bandits take your content down. Especially in the US, as the original content creator, the law is on your side.
I won’t lie to you; policing your content and getting thieves to take it down requires work. But it’s a small price to pay – and it may not take as long as you’d think. Charles Fagundes, editorial manager here at SEO Chat for years before he moved back to the programming side, notes that it depends on whether the theft was committed unknowingly or on purpose. “If it’s unknowingly, it can take about an hour of work, and the content comes down in a few days,” he explained. “If it’s on purpose, it can take multiple hours of searching and threatening and a week or two to have it fixed.”
Some people manage it in even less time. Jonathan Bailey, writing about content theft myths for Blog Herald, observed from his experience with more than 600 cases of plagiarism that “an average case of plagiarism should never take longer than twenty minutes to resolve. Most, in fact, can be resolved in less than ten.” So let’s take a look at what you need to do to keep your content where it belongs.
Next: Detection >>
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