Publishing Articles + Plagiarism
-
Everybody at some point will write a feature rich article and publish it on their website.
What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word.
If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content.Question:
Should site owners be worried about this type of practice?
How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?Any other good advice would be appreciated...
Thanks Mark
-
Doug,
You are the man, nailed it!
Robert
-
Mark, just thought I'd add to responses comments Robert and Devanur have left with some personal experience.
Content from one of my sites was being copied and republished on multiple sites, and then re-copied/re-published on more! (Some niches are worse than others!)
What I started to do was to make a concious effort to make sure I included links to other content on my site within my articles. These links were to relevant content and were referenced in such a way that editing the link out would make parts of the article meaningless.
If they leave the links in unedited (and the kind of people scraping your content aren't the kind of people who want to take time to carefully edit the content) then you'll get a link from their site back to your own.
Make sure that you use the full URL (nor just the relative path) in links within your content. This way they'll point to your site when the article is copied.
You can also add images and other media (that you reference in your article) which has your banding and/or site name on. This increases the cost in time/effort required if someone wants to pass your content off as their own.
Since I started doing this I get a small trickle of referrals who have become repeat visitors on my site. I can also find people using my content by looking at my back links profiles and analytics.
The only caveat here is that you need to be aware of where you content is being republished. You may not want to get lots of low value links or links from spammy pages.
Doug.
-
You are most welcome Mark. At some point or the other, we all (at least people who come up with original content) would have faced the content scraping or stealing issue. Its all the part of the game. Being the rightful owners of the content, we should not leave any stone unturned while trying to protect our rights for our content. Personally, I have seen the copyright notice work well with manual content stealers but, for those who use automated tools to scrape and publish content, there is no definite method to stop them. Wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Robert and Devanur,
Thank you for taking the time in writing a detailed summary on how to safe guard oneself.In particular, I warm to the idea that we can protect our content using rel=author, **rel=publisher **and https://plus.google.com/authorship
I suppose all our best attempts may never safeguard our content 100%. However, at least Google, etc will know where the article originated from. Maybe Google have some mechanics in place, to place on there radar those sites that steal content.
Thanks Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Your concerns are very much true and unfortunately there is no absolute solution for this issue.However, the following might help you face and handle the issue:
1. Use Google authorship.
This will help the search engines recognize the correct or the rightful owner of the content. Here you go for more:
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html
2. Have the copyright notices published along with the content. Give clear syndication guidelines like, an attribution in the form of a link pointing to your webpage (that the content resides on) if someone wants to publish on their website.
3. You can always file DMCA complaints right from the Google webmaster tools account.
4. You can use Google Alerts to watch out for any of your content being stolen and published elsewhere.
Here you go for more in this regard:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/find-remove-stolen-content/
Hope the above help.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Mark
I like the question and am going to handle it sentence by sentence: "What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word."
Nothing can stop anyone from doing this. Frankly, I could copy your question and put it on Moz as mine. It would probably take at least a few minutes for someone at Moz to catch it and take it down. But, nothing can stop me from doing it if I care less about the consequences.
"If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content."
First, this is an assumption many make and I do not necessarily agree with it. Second, within copyright law there are work products you can save over time that can assist you (but they are not foolproof) with a claim against someone, there are timestamps in many CMS systems that show when a doc was written, published, etc., You could resubmit a sitemap as soon as you publish, you could fetch as Google as soon as you publish (not the intent of fetch as Google, but you could), you can submit for copyright for $35US if you are in the U.S. (and if you had ten articles on the same site you could submit them all for the same $35), that submission to register would protect you, etc.
**Should site owners be worried about this type of practice? **Only if they care about:
- their site(s),
- their work,
- their client's work,
- the fact that until someone stands up to a bully, he keeps on being a bully.
_How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?_rel=author, rel=publisher
By utilizing these correctly, the moment you publish to the Internet, this is your article. Yes, someone else could take it and rewrite it, etc and then use rel=author (I know this because with the syndication services/news agencies "sharing content" we have had their authors take our content and place their byline on it - no we are not members of any syndication service so I call that theft even though the person is so used to being able to do that with articles written by others in the service they think they can do it to anyone.) but, in the end you have a record of being the one who first put it on the web and that you are the author.
Next, I think if your piece is valuable enough to you, you will copyright it. Value is your definition. With that copyright, you can report them to Google or Bing or Yahoo, etc. as taking copyrighted content and Google will eventually take action. REMEMBER - I am not talking about a copyright where you stuck a circle with a 'C' in it on your page; I am talking about a registered copyright. If they are hit with enough reports they are doing this the penalties for violating TOS can be severe.
Hope this helps you out,
Robert
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What are safe promotion techniques for articles targeting low competition keywords on a high authority site?
Hi SEO Community, The title says it all; we are running a content strategy that is targeting relevant low volume, low competition keywords published on a high authority domain. How would you design your promotion / reachout / linkbuilding / strategy in this context? Would you assume internal linking would do the job or are there easy wins to earn rankings in this low competition environment? /T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ppseo800 -
Article section on site or blog?
So, I've just started using MOZ since I've decided I wanna be an "expert" in SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
I run a couple of successful websites in Denmark and I've had some SEO guy do some SEO a few years back, but now I wanna learn this myself. I've already read a lot of books, blogs on the subject and talked with several SEO "experts". Anyways, I have a concrete "problem" which I need some help on deciding what to do. Its the same issue / dilemma on all my sites. Dilemma
On my site i have a menu-section called Articles and tips. As the name implies it's basically articles and tips on subjects related to the site.
The articles are both informal for the users and I also use these to attract new users on specific keywords.
The articles are not "spam" articles or quickly made articles, the actually give good information to the users and are wellwritten and so. I've hired a girl to create more articles, so there will be a good flow on articles, interviews and so on soon. Some SEO guys tells me, that I should create and use a external blog "instead" and post the articles there instead of on my site. (ex www.newsiteblog.com) And another SEO guy tells me that I should run a blog on my own site (ex www.ownsite.com/blog) , where I post the articles. I have a really hard time deciding what is the best way, since I hear all kinds of ideas, and really dont know who to trust. My own idea is, that it seems "stupid" to take content from the site and put on external blog.
Then I would also have to create a new blog, and point links from that to my site and so. Any of you guys have any ideas? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
Worth contributing articles to a Page Rank 1 site?
My intuition tells me that it is not going to help with any SEO link benefit by posting an article as a guest writer on a Page Rank site of #1. It's a rather new fashion content site. The article would be informative and not a sales pitch. The only link is to our url home page in the bio. I've been told that links from low page ranking sites don't help anymore. But maybe over time the site will achieve higher PR status, and then the link in it would help us? Any thoughts? Thanks! ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Adding a Directory to Successful Article Website
We are considering adding roughly 1,300 pages to a 2,300 page website within the drug rehab niche. Our website is generating roughly 10,000 uniques from Search / month. **Is there a way to estimate the change in traffic to the existing content on the site when we add 30-40% pages in the form of a directory? ** **Is there a way to estimate the effect of the existing traffic and links to our newly added part of the site (the directory)? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alltreatment0 -
Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why? More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request. Two weeks later, Google refused, saying.. "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes." We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites. Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site? What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them? Any other tips/tricks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TellThemEverything0 -
Same article published 3 times--do we still benefit from the links?
Hi, A reporter recently mentioned us in a leading publication, and that article was picked up by two other big publications. Do we benefit from all three links, or do we only benefit from the link once since it is the same article?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Ezine Articles - Copied Content on Site
One of my clients has a bunch of articles on the normal article syndication sites. They have duplicated these articles on their own site. My instinct is to implement on the offending pages of the clients site. Anyone with any experience of something similar? Is this the right way to go? Thanks in advance. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0