How to Protect Your Blog Posts Content To Prevent Getting Copied

How to Protect Your Blog Posts Content to Prevent Getting Copied

Plagiarism is never acceptable, especially when the author has spent hours conceptualizing, researching, writing, editing, and proofreading his or her material.

There are times when authors agree to share their content for credit or a backlink, but there are people who make huge efforts in trying to steal content from their original creators.

You’ll easily find thousands of blogs online and unbeknownst to most people, a majority of these exist because of plagiarism and RSS feed aggregation.

An RSS feed aggregator is a tool or a program that can be set up to collect and publish popular content from multiple sources in one site.

Plagiarized content is bad enough but most of the time, leechers or those who’ve stolen content actually rake in more traffic to their sites because of it.

If you’re a blogger who’s making an effort to deliver quality content to your audience, this can really be quite disheartening and demotivating. It can also be rather frustrating.

Although there really isn’t any concrete solution to this issue, there are safeguards that are now being put in place by search engines like Google to at least protect content creators.

Google, for example, has implemented what’s known as a DMCA policy, which is related to how sites are ranked in search results.

It helps but it doesn’t fully solve the problem.

And of course, no one has the time to consistently keep filing complaints when it comes to stolen content.

Yes, this policy calls for the manual filing of reports if you just so happen to notice your content published in another site without your permission.

Fortunately, there are ways to prevent your content from being copied. However, you have to take some time to create a system for it.

This will involve dealings with third-party service providers and boosted monitoring skills on your part.

Here are some of the things that you can do to avoid getting your blog posts copied:

Disable the Right-Click Function

On most computers, the right-click option allows people to copy content after highlighting parts, if not all of it.

You have to manually disable this function if you want to reduce the risks of your content being plagiarized.

There will be some tools that will still allow your article to be copied but removing the easiest access point, the right-click function, will be substantial in discouraging leechers from doing what they intend to.

There are different methods to disable this functionality. Just refer to the helpdesk on your chosen blog platform.

Only Provide RSS Partials

When RSS feed aggregators are used, scrapers will be notified whenever your site is updated with new content. You have the option to create the specific content that these aggregators can scrape.

In this case, ensure that your system only releases a summary of the article plus qualifiers like “Read More” with a link back to your website.

This way, leechers can’t rely on automated methods to copy your content. They’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way — the method that takes more time to perform.

Unless they have a lot of spare time on their hands, chances are they’ll be discouraged to go through the entire process.

Schedule Content Updates

Considering that your content is prone to getting stolen courtesy of leechers, you might want to consider applying regular but unscheduled updates for every piece of content that you release.

You can have this done a few days after something is published then several weeks after that.

The way RSS feed aggregators work is that they scrape sites and take note of every single update.

This is how leechers often get higher ranks on search engines — because your content on their page gets scraped and indexed second, making them considerably the most recent resource.

When you schedule updates, your content will be marked as new; and the fresher it is, the more relevant search engines will consider it to be.

What you can do is schedule your content to appear on your page a few days after you schedule it to be published.

Automate Your Backlinks

Another excellent way to reduce having your blog posts copied without you being acknowledged is to automate your backlinks.

This means that if a leecher copies any part of your blog post, a backlink to your page and the original post will automatically be included in the published copy the minute that it’s pasted onto their website.

Flash Warnings on Your Page

If you don’t mind not being discreet, you can go with this option and flash warnings on your page. You can use a plagiarism reminder or a copyright warning.

If you applied tools like Google’s DMCA, you can even put the DMCA logo on your page and mention that your assets are protected by the policy. Hopefully, these will deter leechers from stealing your work.

Your blog posts not being copied can’t be guaranteed 100% but there are ways to reduce the onset of it happening. These are some of the ways that you can fight it but there are other methods that you can consider. Just like with anything else, go with the method that satisfies your preferences the most.

Most of these methods involve no financial investment so that’s some good news right there. So take the time to check out how each one works and weigh the pros and cons. See if they might affect your page’s functionality and user experience then work from there.