How to Protect Your Content

Picture of Snatch Thieves - SnatchThieves003.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your content is your most precious
asset. It takes efforts and time not only to create it but also to
protect it from thieves. Unfortunately, content theft is way too
common and there is hardly a site that hasn't been affected.

On the other hand, as my experience
shows, when there are thousands of articles to be looked after, this
process takes too much time and in practice makes sense to do only
for important articles. Anyway, you can't let thieves go with your
content – you must know what to do when you encounter theft. Here
are the steps how to protect your content.

Why Your Content Is Your Most Important Asset

Unless you are new to SEO, the answer to this question is obvious.
As we say, “Content Is King”. You need original content in order
to rank well in Google and this is why you chunk articles, images,
videos, etc. to publish on your site. However, it is so easy to
copy+paste content and this is why content theft is so common.

If it weren't bad enough that you feed somebody else's site for
free, the duplicate
content penalty adds insult to injury. Google is trying really
hard to deal with duplicates but it is way too common to see stolen
articles rank higher than your original. This is why it is so
important to protect your content in any way you can.

Place Copyright Notices and Watermarks

As naïve as it might sound, sometimes thieves aren't aware they
are stealing. There are many articles, images, videos, etc. in the
public domain that are free to use even commercially. In order to
avoid confusion your content isn't in the public domain, be sure to
place a Copyright notice in the footer of your site, or even better –
under the copyrighted piece of content itself.

It also makes sense to add physical barriers to theft. For
instance, you can add watermarks for images and videos – these
aren't 100% secure but they will stop some of the thieves because
with your watermark it will be awkward to use the stuff elsewhere.

For articles, you may want to disable text selection. This will
make it harder to copy content directly and will stop many thieves
because now copying your content involves more efforts.
Unfortunately, there are other ways to copy your content (though they
do require more effort), so if somebody really wants your content,
disabled copying won't stop them but it's more than nothing.

Use Google Authorship to Guard Your Content

Google Authorship
is a very useful tool when it comes to content protection and
building your online reputation. Basically, the idea is simple –
you enter your online stuff and claim authorship about it.

The only issue is that you must use your real name – this is a
problem, if you write under a pseudonym, or ghost write, or simply
don't want to disclose your authorship because of privacy concerns.
If your site has multiple writers, you still can use Google
Authorship but each of them must claim his or her articles
separately.

Once your content is entered in Google Authorship, Google knows
it's you who created it, so even if it gets copied somewhere else,
you won't get the duplicate content punishment.

Set Google Alerts to Watch for Copied Content

Protecting your content from theft is one thing, catching thieves
is another. Even if you do a good job in guarding your content, there
will always be thieves. The easiest way to catch them is with the
help of Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is another useful service from Google. Without going
into too much detail, the logic is this:

You copy sentences from your text and create alerts to be notified
when they appear online. You need to make them a direct match (i.e.
use quotations), so that when your words get discovered somewhere
else, you get an alert. It's best if you create 2 or 3 alerts per
article – one for the first paragraph and some more from random
places in the text.

Your first paragraph might be copied more – for instance as an
intro to your article, followed by a link to your site. This isn't
theft but you still might want to be aware of it. Also, if your
content is published and you are quoted as the author, this
technically isn't theft either, though you certainly might not like
it.

Steps to Take to Deal with the Theft

After you get an alert and discover that content of yours has been
stolen, here is what you can do next.

Prepare Your Evidence

The first step is to gather your evidence. This means to make
screenshots and prepare the original files. Of course, it's hard to
prove you were the first to publish this particular piece because
having the drafts for an article doesn't mean much – they could
have been created afterwards in attempt to frame the original author.
For images and videos, if you have the source files, this could be
more of a proof.

If your content is indexed in Google and it has a date (and of
course this date is prior to the date the copy was indexed), you can
use this as well as an evidence the content was stolen from you, not
vice versa.

Contact the Thief (and Their Host, If Necessary)

After you have your evidence, now it's time to take real steps.
You might be tempted to but don't start biting right away. First,
send a friendly email to the infringing party. Even if the
probability isn't high, it's possible the theft wasn't on
deliberately. It's possible that after your friendly email the blog
owner removes your content and the problem is solved.

If the friendly email to the blog owner doesn't help, contact
their hosting provider. Attach the evidence you have and if the
infringement is blatant, it's quite possible their hosting provider
might even close their account, if they don't want to remove the
stolen content on their own.

File a DMCA Complaint

Very often the steps in the previous sections suffice to deal with
thieves but if they don't do the job for you, you will have to use
the heavy artillery – i.e. file a DMCA complaint with Google.

You submit a DMCA
(Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint with Google to tell them
to deindex content stolen from you. In this case 'stolen' means used
without your permission or without crediting you. Google is usually
quick in removing stolen content, so you can expect that shortly
after you submit the complaint, it will be removed from Google's
index.

Dealing with content theft is very time-consuming but if you want
to protect your rights (and your SEO rankings), you need to do it.
It's a never ending battle but with the right tools, as described in
this article, your chance of success is good. source: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-protect-your-content-article-54.php

Similar Page Checker

Similar Page Checker Enter First URL Enter Second URL

How it Works

Search Engines are known to act upon websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content.

Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet,
or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other
(usually the case with dynamic product catalog pages).

This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages.

The exact percentage of similarity after with a search engine may penalize you is not known,
it varies from search engine to search engine,
Your aim should be to keep your page similarity as LOW as possible.

 

Duplicate Content Filter

This article will help you understand why you might be caught in the filter, and ways to avoid it.

Duplicate Content Filter: What it is and how it works

Duplicate Content has become a huge topic of discussion lately, thanks
to the new filters that search engines have implemented. This article
will help you understand why you might be caught in the filter, and ways
to avoid it. We'll also show you how you can determine if your pages
have duplicate content, and what to do to fix it.

Search engine spam is any deceitful attempts to deliberately trick the
search engine into returning inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality
search results. Many times this behavior is seen in pages that are
exact replicas of other pages which are created to receive better
results in the search engine. Many people assume that creating multiple
or similar copies of the same page will either increase their chances
of getting listed in search engines or help them get multiple listings,
due to the presence of more keywords.

In order to make a search more relevant to a user, search engines use a
filter that removes the duplicate content pages from the search results,
and the spam along with it. Unfortunately, good, hardworking
webmasters have fallen prey to the filters imposed by the search engines
that remove duplicate content. It is those webmasters who unknowingly
spam the search engines, when there are some things they can do to avoid
being filtered out. In order for you to truly understand the concepts
you can implement to avoid the duplicate content filter, you need to
know how this filter works. 

First, we must understand that the term "duplicate content penalty" is
actually a misnomer. When we refer to penalties in search engine
rankings, we are actually talking about points that are deducted from a
page in order to come to an overall relevancy score. But in reality,
duplicate content pages are not penalized.
Rather they are simply filtered, the way you would use a sieve to remove
unwanted particles. Sometimes, "good particles" are accidentally
filtered out.

Knowing the difference between the filter and the penalty, you can now
understand how a search engine determines what duplicate content is.
There are basically four types of duplicate content that are filtered
out:

1. 
   Websites with Identical Pages - These pages are considered
   duplicate, as well as websites that are identical to another website on
   the Internet are also considered to be spam. Affiliate sites with the
   same look and feel which contain identical content, for example, are
   especially vulnerable to a duplicate content filter. Another example
   would be a website with doorway pages. Many times, these doorways are
   skewed versions of landing pages. However, these landing pages are
   identical to other landing pages. Generally, doorway pages are intended
   to be used to spam the search engines in order to manipulate search
   engine results.
   


2. 
   Scraped Content - Scraped content is taking content from a web
   site and repackaging it to make it look different, but in essence it is
   nothing more than a duplicate page. With the popularity of blogs on the
   internet and the syndication of those blogs, scraping is becoming more
   of a problem for search engines.
   


3. 
   E-Commerce Product Descriptions - Many eCommerce sites out there
   use the manufacturer's descriptions for the products, which hundreds or
   thousands of other eCommerce stores in the same competitive markets are
   using too. This duplicate content, while harder to spot, is still
   considered spam.
   


4. 
   Distribution of Articles - If you publish an article, and it gets
   copied and put all over the Internet, this is good, right? Not
   necessarily for all the sites that feature the same article. This type
   of duplicate content can be tricky, because even though Yahoo and MSN
   determine the source of the original article and deems it most relevant
   in search results, other search engines like Google may not, according
   to some experts.
   

So, how does a search engine's duplicate content filter work?
Essentially, when a search engine robot crawls a website, it reads the
pages, and stores the information in its database. Then, it compares
its findings to other information it has in its database. Depending
upon a few factors, such as the overall relevancy score of a website, it
then determines which are duplicate content, and then filters out the
pages or the websites that qualify as spam. Unfortunately, if your
pages are not spam, but have enough similar content, they may still be
regarded as spam.

There are several things you can do to avoid the duplicate content
filter. First, you must be able to check your pages for duplicate
content. Using our Similar Page Checker,
you will be able to determine similarity between two pages and make
them as unique as possible. By entering the URLs of two pages, this
tool will compare those pages, and point out how they are similar so
that you can make them unique.

Since you need to know which sites might have copied your site or pages,
you will need some help. We recommend using a tool that searches for
copies of your page on the Internet: www.copyscape.com.
Here, you can put in your web page URL to find replicas of your page
on the Internet. This can help you create unique content, or even
address the issue of someone "borrowing" your content without your
permission.

Let's look at the issue regarding some search engines possibly not
considering the source of the original content from distributed
articles. Remember, some search engines, like Google, use link
popularity to determine the most relevant results. Continue to build
your link popularity, while using tools like www.copyscape.com
to find how many other sites have the same article, and if allowed by
the author, you may be able to alter the article as to make the content
unique.

If you use distributed articles for your content, consider how relevant
the article is to your overall web page and then to the site as a whole.
Sometimes, simply adding your own commentary to the articles can be
enough to avoid the duplicate content filter; the Similar Page Checker
could help you make your content unique. Further, the more relevant
articles you can add to compliment the first article, the better.
Search engines look at the entire web page and its relationship to the
whole site, so as long as you aren't exactly copying someone's pages,
you should be fine.

If you have an eCommerce site, you should write original descriptions
for your products. This can be hard to do if you have many products,
but it really is necessary if you wish to avoid the duplicate content
filter. Here's another example why using the Similar Page Checker
is a great idea. It can tell you how you can change your descriptions
so as to have unique and original content for your site. This also
works well for scraped content also. Many scraped content sites offer
news. With the Similar Page Checker, you can easily determine where the
news content is similar, and then change it to make it unique.

Do not rely on an affiliate site which is identical to other sites or
create identical doorway pages. These types of behaviors are not only
filtered out immediately as spam, but there is generally no comparison
of the page to the site as a whole if another site or page is found as
duplicate, and get your entire site in trouble.

The duplicate content filter is sometimes hard on sites that don't
intend to spam the search engines. But it is ultimately up to you to
help the search engines determine that your site is as unique as
possible. By using the tools in this article to eliminate as much
duplicate content as you can, you'll help keep your site original and
fresh.