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Ways To See If Your Content Is Being Stolen

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

They call it content scraping. Thieves and pirates, or whatever you choose to call them, will take content from legitimate websites and build complete AdSense sites around them. They might make a little bit of money each month of the content, but that’s not the point. The content belongs to someone else. Should you care?

Yesterday, I addressed the (content theft) issue briefly and I do believe we can waste a lot of time chasing down the ne’er-do-wells. But there are ways of finding these content scrapers without wasting a lot of time. Here are a few ideas:

  • Copyscape- Go to copyscape.com and copy your website content into the space provided. If someone is stealing your content Copyscape will let you know.
  • Use Google Alerts to let you know whenever someone uses your name, website address, or other identifying information
  • If you blog using WordPress, WP will show you links from sites that trackback to yours – Lorelle VanFossen recommends putting full links to your articles in your posts that will activate as trackbacks whenever someone steals your content
  • There is now a digital fingerprint plug-in for WordPress that inserts special words into your content that can only be seen when viewed as an RSS feed; this plug-in will notify you when your content is being scraped.

And just for the record, I agree with Andy Beal about cease and desist letters:

However, every now and then, you’ll discover someone that is truly ripping-off your content and building their reputation on the back of your writing. Those are the guys to send a cease and desist to.

Hey, a blogger’s got to do what a blogger’s got to do.

One Response to “Ways To See If Your Content Is Being Stolen”

  • namecritic says:
    August 3, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    I also think you should look to see whether the person just doesn’t know any better or if they really are being malicious.

    There are a lot of people who are new to blogging, web content, and article writing. They read squeeze pages that tell them all the shortcuts to being successful on the web including a recent one called “site stealer” that promotes the stealing of content asa if it is a common and successful business practice.

    People like Michael Cheney and Russel Brunson perpetrate this kind of stuff to newbies all the time. it’s no wonder some of them think it’sd okay to scrape and steal.

    So before ranting to them right out of the gate, look and see if you think they are being malicious or they are just misinformaed. Give them the benefit of the doubt and their true colors will show up.

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