Marking our content as original, where the rel=author tag might not be applied

[Dilbak]

Hello,

Can anyone tell, if it is possible to protect text –type content without the rel=author tag?

We host a business listing site, where, apart from the general contact information, we have also started to write original 800+ character-long unique and original contents for the suppliers, where we expect visits, so rankings should be increased.

My issue is that this is a very competitive business, and content crawling is really an everyday practice. Of course, I would like to keep my original content or at least mark it as mine for Google.

The easiest way would be the author tag, but the problem is, that I do not want our names and our photos to be assigned to these contents, because from one hand, we are not acknowledged content providers on our own (no bio and whatsoever), and on the other hand, we provide contents for every sort of businesses, so just having additional links to our other contents, might not help readers to get what they want. I also really do not think that a photo of me could help increase the CTR from the SERP:)

What we currently do, is that we submit every major fresh content through url submission in WMT, hoping that first indexing might help. We have only a handful of them within a day, so not more than 10.

Yes, I could perhaps use absolute links, but this one is not a feasible scenario in all cases, and about DMCA, as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own.

So finally, I do not mind our contents being stolen, as I can’t possibly prevent this. I want however our original content to be recognized as ours by Google, even after the stealing is done.

(Best would be an ’author tag for business’, so connected to our business Google+ page, but I am not aware, this function can be used this way.)

Thank you in advance for all of you, sharing your thoughts with me on the topic.

[Dilbak]

Hi Mat,

You have provided some great clarification, thank you.

Now, I only have one thing to be sorted out:

Should I add the DMCA protection badges to all pages with unique content, as soon as they are created?

My dilemma is, that let's say I find my content somewhere else. I will submit a take down request through DMCA. How it is going to be proven, whose site owns the original content?

I am definetely not an expert in this, but it can easily happen, that my page is not the older one, and the page where my content is placed to, simply just changed its previous content, but the page itself is older than my relevant page.

Thank you

[matbennett]

Hi András ,

I think that you are getting confused to what rel=author actually does.  It can help as part of the picture that shows google who the originator of content is, but it doesn't assert it in the way you seem to be suggesting. I'll come back to that, but let me address another point first:

as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own.

This is plainly wrong.  I would agree that whatever you see on the internet can just be stolen. However that is not the same as owning it, something that international law backs up.

If you have valuable content that is likely to get stolen then you need to do 2 things:

1. Ensure that search engines find your copy first and see you as the originator

2. Police it

#1 You seem to be doing. Manual submission via webmaster tools sounds painful to me, but will do that.  Tweet it, link it, ping it etc. Do what you can to establish "this was here" early and to get Google to index it.

Part of that same picture is to be seen as trustworthy. Get those high authority citations, ensure you content is always unique etc.

However, #2 is about you taking responsibility for your content. It's yours, you own it, there are no internet police so it is up to you.  Try a service like copyscape, or just use google alerts to let you know when people steal stuff.  When they do hit them with a take down notice, send the same to their hosts, domain registrar etc - then follow it up with a DMCA request.

This will stop a lot of it.  It will also make it a  pain in the bum for some of the others (if it is more hassle to steal from you than someone else then they will steal from someone else!).  It also starts undermining the trust in their sites.  If google have frequent DMCA requests about particular domains it helps build that picture.  If you see them stealing other people content let the other victims know as well and encourage them to do the same.