If you have a blog on your website, plagiarism is a topic that will eventually come up. Chances are, you want to protect your blog content and ensure it isn’t copied or re-posted without your permission.
Having someone copy your content and post it as their own is pretty bad. However, things get even worse if their “copied” content begins to outrank yours in search results.
Keep reading to learn more about protecting your content and ensuring it remains unique to your site.
Learn How Your Content Is Accessed
It is almost impossible to keep someone from copying your content. If it can be accessed on a browser, almost anyone can see and steal it.
This is how so many people are stealing content from someone else’s site. They view the content, copy and paste it into their site, and then publish it.
It is also possible for people to steal content through your RSS feed. Because of this, you must put safeguards in place to ensure your content is safe everywhere.
Disable Text Selection
Some people will simply copy and paste content from someone else’s blog. You should stop this by disabling text selection. Doing this is going to make it much more challenging to copy.
If your blog is on a WordPress site, then you can use the WP Content Copy Protection plugin. This prevents text selection, source code viewing, right-click, and keyboard shortcuts.
Watermark All Images
If you plan to use images on your blog, which is a good idea to break up your text, these should be protected, too.
One of the most effective and easiest ways to do this is by adding a watermark to them. This shows that you own the copyright to the images and make people think again about copying them (or even creating a hotlink to them). That’s because they will have your blogs or business’s name on there.
This is possible to do with most graphics packages. However, there are online sites that will create the watermark for you, too.
Keep in mind that you can do this for free with any images you created and own. However, you should check the licensing information before doing it with any image that you downloaded from another source. After all, you don’t want to steal another person’s content.
Manage Your RSS Feed
People can also steal content through your RSS feed. An easy way to stop this or make it more difficult is by only offering a partial feed. This means that readers will have to click your link to see the entire post. However, plagiarists will have to do this, which may discourage them from moving forward with their plagiarism plans.
Taking the Right Steps
There is no foolproof way to keep someone from stealing your content completely. However, if you implement the tips here, you should make this much harder to do, or at least make it require too much effort. In the long run, taking the right steps to protect your content will pay off.