Content & Writing Tycoon

**daisies1062** · 07-28-2011, 09:47 PM

My friend's site lost her ranking last month on search engines, it was reduced to zero. She noticed that her content was copied and those who stole her content have a high page ranking instead. What measure should be done to protect her content or how can she protect it in the first place before it will happen.

**willcode4beer** · 07-29-2011, 12:21 PM

She should file a DMCA takedown notice

**vangogh** · 07-29-2011, 03:44 PM

Realistically you're not going to be able to prevent people from copying content and republishing it, but you can keep it from hurting your site.

1. When you publish content add some links in it to other content on your site. Use absolute urls with the full http. The people copying generally won't remove those links so it signals where the content originally appeared.

2. Search for rel="author" There are ways to markup your content to show who the original author is.

3. Work on seo in general. Search engines will choose which version of the same content they think is best to present. While it would be nice if that was always the original it's not always the case. They can't always tell which version was published first. They often choose the one from the site they consider to have the most authority. If you practice good seo and get others to link back to a variety of pages on your site you can usually build more authority than the people copying and republishing your content

**jgetman** · 08-01-2011, 11:03 AM

There are some cheap services like guardlex dot com. They search and take-down such "unwanted" copies of your content.

**dobraltd** · 08-15-2011, 11:55 AM

Write abuse to a hosting provider

**chrishirst** · 08-15-2011, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dobraltd

Write abuse to a hosting provider

Is that your solution to everything???

Quote:

Originally Posted by dobraltd

Try to write abuse to a hosting provider and processing bank

**visiontree** · 09-02-2011, 07:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

Realistically you're not going to be able to prevent people from copying content and republishing it, but you can keep it from hurting your site.

1. When you publish content add some links in it to other content on your site. Use absolute urls with the full http. The people copying generally won't remove those links so it signals where the content originally appeared.

2. Search for rel="author" There are ways to markup your content to show who the original author is.

3. Work on seo in general. Search engines will choose which version of the same content they think is best to present. While it would be nice if that was always the original it's not always the case. They can't always tell which version was published first. They often choose the one from the site they consider to have the most authority. If you practice good seo and get others to link back to a variety of pages on your site you can usually build more authority than the people copying and republishing your content

Good tips, but here's a question I have based on curiosity. Shouldn't they be able to tell which the original is by the date posted? Or even the date the site/blog was updated with such information? To me that would seem like the easiest way to tell what's been copied and by whom.

**chrishirst** · 09-02-2011, 07:18 PM

Quote:

Shouldn't they be able to tell which the original is by the date posted? Or even the date the site/blog was updated with such information? To me that would seem like the easiest way to tell what's been copied and by whom

Search engines only "know" when the content was found by their crawler and "posted dates" can be changed easily enough.

**SiberForum** · 09-05-2011, 11:49 AM

Invent your own style. This is not the protection, but thuis allows recognition of your texts published elsewhere.

**vangogh** · 09-06-2011, 03:57 PM

Like Chris said they'll know the date they found it. Anyone can also change dates. I can copy your post and date it the day before.

Search engines will use whatever criteria they can to decide which is the best page to present. Ideally that would always be the original article, but it isn't always the case. The links to more of your content help. So will building more authority in the eyes of search engines.

**flexdesigns** · 09-07-2011, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willcode4beer

She should file a DMCA takedown notice

Which countries does this apply to.

**willcode4beer** · 09-08-2011, 12:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by flexdesigns

Which countries does this apply to.

I'll refer you to this link: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/...e-of-the-dmca/

Since they'll probably put it better than me

**willcode4beer** · 09-08-2011, 12:11 PM

Followup:
Last night I went to a meetup at Google Headquarters for a discussion on Google+ (video here).

One thing briefly mentioned was, that if you add a link your site in your Google+ profile and in your site, link back to your profile (as the author). They are able to distinguish you as the definitive source.

This might help to reduce the effects of folks who rip off content.

**chrishirst** · 09-10-2011, 04:11 AM

Quote:

I went to a meetup at Google Headquarters

Name dropping eh!

Authorship was something they launched in July. I'm sure Google are hoping/planning on it working two ways.

1/ To help them locate the authoritive source for a document.

2/ Boost signups to Google+

**willcode4beer** · 03:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Name dropping eh!

Well, they're just down the road from me (about a 30 min drive).
I very well can't pass up getting the inside track on technology and a free dinner

The gyros were pretty awesome.

I agree, I'm sure they are looking to get more folks using the little "plus one" buttons as well as sucking them into their social network.

Of course, I think finding the definitive author of a piece of content is probably still scammable. If the plagiarists register themselves as the author of their own site and host duplicate content it could get problematic.

**chicagorox** · 09-21-2011, 01:26 PM

I just wrote a DMCA to google because my entire website had been copied. I hope this doesn't take too long for google to respond.

**flexdesigns** · 11-01-2011, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chicagorox

I just wrote a DMCA to google because my entire website had been copied. I hope this doesn't take too long for google to respond.

as i understood it you send a dmca takedown notice to the persons isp to force them to remove the copyrighted content. I dont think sending it to google will do a great deal of good

thanks

**chrishirst** · 12-28-2011, 10:43 AM

Quote:

I dont think sending it to google will do a great deal of good

Actually if the claim is valid Google will replace the pages in the SERPs with a message and a link to the complaint.

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/dmca.html

For example.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=30399