Protecting Your Site Content and Brand
Today we wanted to step away from the normal topics and talk about something a little different – protecting your site. We’ve had everything under the sun happen to us in terms of people trying to copy our content, copy our site, strip our links, spin our original content into a mess that people think we did, etc… Trust me, we’ve seen it all and if you have success in your niche you will too.
So What Do You Do To Protect Yourself?
The first thing you need to do is realize that you have to protect both your brand and your content. Unique and quality content is becoming more and more critical in Google rankings as is evident by their last update – you can’t afford to let someone else “dilute” that quality by republishing it elsewhere. And it happens all the time…
The first thing you’ve got to do is learn if it is being swiped and that’s not always an easy task. We suggest that you use copyscape.com to do a monthly check of several of your pages. Now, there are monitoring services as well just for this purpose and depending upon the value of your site and content, you may need to go beyond our “basic” recommendations here and actually subscribe to one of those professional monitoring services. It just depends on your needs. But at the very least you should check copyscape.com and also just select a long phrase of about 10 words in length in your content to check and put it in quotes and do a Google search for it. This will reveal other sites that have that exact same phrase and are indexed by Google. Then you can check them and make sure they’re not ripping off your content.
I Found Some Scrapers, Now What Do I Do?
The reality is that there’s not much chance of real enforcement here so your best bet is to be professional yet firm and email them demanding that the content be removed. Inform them that it is copyright protected content and is not authorized for re-publication without expressed and informed consent. Most of the time a single email will take care of the issue. If not all you can do is persist and you may have to get an attorney involved if it makes sense for your business to do so. The fact is, most of these scraper sites wont be around by the time their domain expires anyway, so you just outlast them.
How Can I Prevent This?
Boy, we sure wish we had the answer there… It’s a tough concept because of all of the RSS and syndication models out there, many of the distributions may be legit. Generally if we find our content elsewhere the first thing we look at is did they give us credit? If they are using it will all of our links intact and not stripping our name and branding in an apparent respectful syndication model then we generally don’t even bother emailing. However, if they have clearly gone out of their way to strip our links, strip our branding and reposition the content as their own (and many then will just insert their links into our content) then we step it up and take action.
Unfortunately there really is not much you can do to prevent this. You need to have the appropriate disclaimers on your site stating that the content cannot be reused or republished, etc… and you have to monitor it. We wish there were a better way…
Using Strong Branding
One thing that you can do is create a strong brand and market it heavily. The stronger your brand the more difficult it is for someone to rip you off because there is an identity attached to it. That is something Mike and I are working hard at right now with our Mike and Troy logo, etc… “branding” our content and sites in a way that makes them clearly ours in the minds of our readers.
Other Suggestions
Take a look at this other blog post on Google Alerts and get creative with them. You could easily setup an alert for a phrase within every post you make when you post it so that you’ll get “alerted” when someone else swipes it. Is this 100% effective? Of course not, but it helps…
If you are looking for a pretty good read on other website risks and security items to watch out for, have a look at the Website Risk Guide. It’s 35 pages of business security and risk mitigation techniques for just $37.
Good luck!
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