This is the first post of a series on protecting your website.

It is all very well building your business up, but if you don’t protect it you could end up losing it all, or taking a hit. At the moment one of the things I am focusing on is protecting my business, I’m happy with what I have and don’t want others taking advantage of it, or trying to hurt me. One problem is people stealing your content, that you own the copyright to, and unfortunately it goes on quite a bit.

Thiefs At Work!Content Stealers
This has been a real problem with this blog. People copy my articles and publish them on their own website as their own work. Google then thinks it is duplicate content and hits the rankings. Other people are also able to profit from my hard work. I created the work so I own it and no one can copy it.

The same goes for an an ecommerce store or any type of website. If you research a product you are selling and create a brilliant point of sale that will draw in visitors from search engines and increase sales, don’t let people copy it, it will harm your business!

How To Try And Protect Yourself From The Start
In the footer of this website I have a notice saying “all content may NOT be used without permission”. Will that deter these sort of people? Probably not, but I recommend you put one in your footer anyway. The notice is there on every single page so if you have to take action against someone you made it clear they can’t copy anything.

Also date your work. EG “This article was published on January 1st 2000 by Mr Biggles on mrbiggles.com”. Or if you don’t want to explicitly put that on a page try and keep some kind of proof when a page was published (server records maybe?). This then proves you were the original creator of the work.

How To Find The Thieves
The simplest way is to use copyscape.com. Put the URL of your page you want to find copies of, and it will draw up results from the web of copies it finds. You can then click on them and at the top of the page it shows you how words are duplicate. There are other tools around, search in google for things like ‘duplicate content checker’ to find ones that suit you.

Then What To Do – First Action
First thing is to contact the offending website. Give them the evidence you have found – your page URL, and where they have copied it on their website. Tell them to remove the content immediately as they have no right to use the content because you own it and it explicitly says on your website content may not be copied. If they don’t remove the material tell the person you will inform their web host their client is acting illegally, and you are going to take legal action against them and submit a DMCA infringement. You could also threaten them with a smear campaign on public forums proving how their company behaves and that they are not to be trusted.

Second Action
From here how you act depends on how the other webmaster responds. They may apologise and remove the content immediately, in which case it’s a result, job done. They may blank you altogether thinking you are not serious. They may not even get your email. In these instances send another email stating you contacted them on ‘X date’ and are following up. You should also ‘request a read receipt’ and make the message ‘high priority’.

In a few cases I have found the offender removes the content, but doesn’t email you back. They obviously know they have done wrong but won’t email you to apologise for being a thief. So check the copied content before emailing for a second time as they may have removed it. If they think you aren’t serious contact the host and tell them what you are doing, who knows they may even suspend the website!

Third Action
If they still don’t respond after the second email, or are not cooperating, then you have to decide what to do. If you don’t believe the offending content is having much of a harmful effect (it may be copied on a crappy website with virtually no rankings or visitors) you are best to forget about it – better of spending your time on other issues that can help your business. But if the content is on a major website, or has been copied a lot then you want to go through the effort of a DMCA infringement request, or/and a public smear campaign. A positive result may really help your website getting better rankings thanks to no duplicate content.

Is This A Real Problem?
This is a genuine problem which you should be aware of, because people are behind a computer screen a lof of them think they can get away with it. One of the main articles on this blog was copied by an Indian freelance writer (about 365 words duplicate) who sold it to someone who then distributed it all over the web on article sites, blogs and other publications. It has completely killed the rankings of my article and I’ve made no money from it. So I’m taking action. Many of my articles have been copied many times, harming my rankings. There are also ’scraper sites’ which automatically scrape the content from your website and publish it on their own. So don’t think this doesn’t go on much as their are a lot of people out there copying content.

How To Manage Your Time
This isn’t something I recommend you go mad over and start spending days hunting down content stealers. But it is worth spending an hour or two at the start of each month to check their are no duplicates of your most important work. If you spent a long time on amazing product descriptions don’t let all your good work be wiped out by some illegal acting rat who thinks he can get away with just copying your content because he is behind a computer screen. And often a simple email can get the offending material removed, and an improvement in your pages ranking, definitely worth the effort!