It’s no secret that copied content plagues the web. In a video posted earlier this week, Matt Cutts discusses some of the difficulties in crediting content to the original author and ways that webmasters can protect the value of their content.
Cutts starts out using a hypothetical scenario:
– Site A publishes content
– Site B sees the content on Site A and copies it while changing the creation date to be before that of Site A
– Since Site B is crawled more frequently than Site A, Google sees the article on Site B first and assigns them credit
This hypothetical scenario occurs thousands of times each day as sites copy each other in an effort to rank for trending topics (a practice also known as page view juicing). The level of duplication between sites ranges from complete copies to low quality rewrites, but the end result is that many webmasters complained of losing out on the benefits of links and traffic when they are the original content creators.
When it comes to making sure your content is found before anyone has a chance to rewrite, we recommend:
– Sharing the content on as many social platforms as possible (this can also be done automatically on some services by linking accounts).
– Use a ping service ( Matt’s video recommends the pubsubhubbub protocol )
Additional steps to take:
– Include your author name and site URL at the end of the article. If a scraper is just taking the article body, your details will likely make it to the scraper giving some attribution to your work
– Be aggressive with DMCA notices and use tools like Copyscape to actively seek out copies of your content
How to prevent someone from stealing your online content
