What You Can Do If You're Content Is Being Stolen

What You Can Do If You're Content Is Being Stolen
Sadly there are a lot of people online today who would rather take someone's hard work and use it for their own gain. Even with Google's recent Panda update content is still being copied and posted on other sites without the original owner's permission. Does this mean there's nothing you can do to stop this, fortunately no. While nothing can give you a 100% guarantee of stopping people from taking your content, there are things you can do to make it harder for them to do it.

1. Disable right clicking

Depending in which editor you're using to build your website online of offline, many have the option of disabling right clicking. While this doesn't stop them from being able to copy your content, it does make it that much harder because now their forced to type every word out. It's not much of a deterrent if your site is only a few pages, but if you have dozens or a couple hundred pages that's a lot of extra time and effort they have to put in copying everything.

2. Try to contact them

If you find your content on another website or blog and you didn't give them permission, try contacting them. Again this isn't a 100% guarantee, and the site owner might simply ignore you, you could be dealing with someone who might not know better. It's easy to forget that there are still a lot of people out there with little knowledge on what can and shouldn't be done. A simple email explaining things could go a long way in getting them to stop.

3. Get some copyright protection

You can also copyright your original content using a free copyright site such as My Free Copyright.com. By registering your content on these types of sites your letting the everyone know that you're it's author, it also gives the search engines proof that your it's creator and will help it stay above any copy cats trying to profit from your work.

4. Report them to Google

And last but not least if all else fails, if they refuse to stop when you contacted them, if they ignored your copyright protection and are still posting your content word for word on their site without your permission you can report them directly to Google. Google has a simple form you can fill out if you find a website or blog that violates either their AdSense terms of service, is a spam site, or anything else that needs to be reported because it's ruining the Internet.