How to Protect Your Content

Content is far more valuable than anything else. It requires considerable efforts and much time to produce high quality content and, more to the point, protect it from thieves! Regrettably, content theft is quite a common phenomenon nowadays, because it is extremely easy to copy it from one source and paste it wherever you need.

Nevertheless, you cannot let thieves use your original content, so read what you must do when you come across content theft. The following steps will help you protect your content.

Why Content Keeps Significant Value to Your Business

If you are a green hand in SEO, you must know that "Content Is King"! Original content is the core element for high ranking in search engines. This is why people sweat over each article, each image and each video, published on a website afterwards.

Use Copyright Watermarks and Notices

It is quite paradoxical that in most cases thieves do not even know they are stealing, because Internet is full of free articles, videos and images that can be use even commercially. So, in order to avoid misconception, make sure your content has a Copyright notice in your website footer.

Moreover, you can add watermarks for videos and images and disable text selection for articles. These easy steps will stop many thieves and make it harder to copy content directly.

Other ways to copy content require more efforts. However, if somebody really wants your content, disabled copying probably will not stop him.

Use Google Authorship

When it comes to building your online reputation and content protection, such useful tool as Google Authorship can greatly help you. Actually, it is simple. You should just enter your online profile and claim authorship about it. The only possible problem is that you have to use your real name. So if you write under a pseudonym that would be difficult.

Set Google Alerts to Watch for Copied Content

Besides protecting your content, you may want to catch some thieves. One of the easiest ways to catch them is using Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a useful tool from Google that allows you to copy some piece of your original content and make alerts to be notified when these pieces appear online. Create two or three alerts per article.

How to Handle the Theft

After getting an alert about your stolen content, you should:

• Prepare Your Evidence: make screenshots and prepare the original files. However, it won't be easy to prove you are the author. For videos and images this might be easier, if you have the source files.

• Contact the Thief: Firstly, send him a friendly e-mail letter asking to remove the copy. It is possible the blog owner would remove your content and the problem would be solved. If your e-mail doesn't work, contact his hosting provider and attach the evidence you've prepared.

• File a DMCA Complaint: Usually, the first two steps are not enough to deal with the thieves, so you have to use a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint. You submit a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint with Google to tell them to deindex the stolen content.

Dealing with content theft isn't an easy matter. However, you must do it to protect your original content and your SEO rankings. So, be careful and good luck!

Info presented by Rankwinz