Publishing Articles + Plagiarism

[Mark_Ch]

Everybody at some point will write a feature rich article and publish it on their website.
What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word.
If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content.

Question:
Should site owners be worried about this type of practice?
How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?

Any other good advice would be appreciated...

Thanks Mark

[RobertFisher]

Mark

I like the question and am going to handle it sentence by sentence: "What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word."

Nothing can stop anyone from doing this. Frankly, I could copy your question and put it on Moz as mine. It would probably take at least a few minutes for someone at Moz to catch it and take it down. But, nothing can stop me from doing it if I care less about the consequences.

"If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content."

First, this is an assumption many make and I do not necessarily agree with it. Second, within copyright law there are work products you can save over time that can assist you (but they are not foolproof) with a claim against someone, there are timestamps in many CMS systems that show when a doc was written, published, etc., You could resubmit a sitemap as soon as you publish, you could fetch as Google as soon as you publish (not the intent of fetch as Google, but you could), you can submit for copyright for $35US if you are in the U.S. (and if you had ten articles on the same site you could submit them all for the same $35), that submission to register would protect you, etc.

**Should site owners be worried about this type of practice? **Only if they care about:

• their site(s),
• their work,
• their client's work,
• the fact that until someone stands up to a bully, he keeps on being a bully.

_How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?_rel=author, rel=publisher

By utilizing these correctly, the moment you publish to the Internet, this is your article. Yes, someone else could take it and rewrite it, etc and then use rel=author (I know this because with the syndication services/news agencies "sharing content" we have had their authors take our content and place their byline on it - no we are not members of any syndication service so I call that theft even though the person is so used to being able to do that with articles written by others in the service they think they can do it to anyone.) but, in the end you have a record of being the one who first put it on the web and that you are the author.

Next, I think if your piece is valuable enough to you, you will copyright it. Value is your definition. With that copyright, you can report them to Google or Bing or Yahoo, etc. as taking copyrighted content and Google will eventually take action. REMEMBER - I am not talking about a copyright where you stuck a circle with a 'C' in it on your page; I am talking about a registered copyright. If they are hit with enough reports they are doing this the penalties for violating TOS can be severe.

Hope this helps you out,

Robert

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Mark,

Your concerns are very much true and unfortunately there is no absolute solution for this issue.However, the following might help you face and handle the issue:

1. Use Google authorship.

This will help the search engines recognize the correct or the rightful owner of the content. Here you go for more:

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html

2. Have the copyright notices published along with the content. Give clear syndication guidelines like, an attribution in the form of a link pointing to your webpage (that the content resides on) if someone wants to publish on their website.

3. You can always file DMCA complaints right from the Google webmaster tools account.

4. You can use Google Alerts to watch out for any of your content being stolen and published elsewhere.

Here you go for more in this regard:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/find-remove-stolen-content/

Hope the above help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[Mark_Ch]

Robert and Devanur,
Thank you for taking the time in writing a detailed summary on how to safe guard oneself.

In particular, I warm to the idea that we can protect our content using rel=author, **rel=publisher **and https://plus.google.com/authorship

I suppose all our best attempts may never safeguard our content 100%. However, at least Google, etc will know where the article originated from. Maybe Google have some mechanics in place, to place on there radar those sites that steal content.

Thanks Mark

[Devanur-Rafi]

You are most welcome Mark. At some point or the other, we all (at least people who come up with original content) would have faced the content scraping or stealing issue. Its all the part of the game. Being the rightful owners of the content, we should not leave any stone unturned while trying to protect our rights for our content. Personally, I have seen the copyright notice work well with manual content stealers but, for those who use automated tools to scrape and publish content, there is no definite method to stop them. Wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[DougRoberts]

Mark, just thought I'd add to responses  comments Robert and Devanur have left with some personal experience.

Content from one of my sites was being copied and republished on multiple sites, and then re-copied/re-published on more! (Some niches are worse than others!)

What I started to do was to make a concious effort to make sure I included links to other content on my site within my articles. These links were to relevant content and were referenced in such a way that editing the link out would make parts of the article meaningless.

If they leave the links in unedited (and the kind of people scraping your content aren't the kind of people who want to take time to carefully edit the content) then you'll get a link from their site back to your own.

Make sure that you use the full URL (nor just the relative path) in links within your content. This way they'll point to your site when the article is copied.

You can also add images and other media (that you reference in your article) which has your banding and/or site name on. This increases the cost in time/effort required if someone wants to pass your content off as their own.

Since I started doing this I get a small trickle of referrals who have become repeat visitors on my site. I can also find people using my content by looking at my back links profiles and analytics.

The only caveat here is that you need to be aware of where you content is being republished. You may not want to get lots of low value links or links from spammy pages.

Doug.

[RobertFisher]

Doug,

You are the man, nailed it!

Robert