incrediBILL - 7:30 pm on Sep 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

The proliferation of these tags forces content providers into constant vigilance in monitoring new opt-out codes as they arise, and constantly update their websites accordingly. Notably, these aren’t sitewide htaccess commands, they need to be added to every single web page. Not everyone has dynamic content!

Standard bot blocking techniques and anti-hotlinking for image leeches, both which have been around for many years, tend to be quite effective to thwart this crap before it starts.

Problem is that people are only REACTIVE to the issue of scraping, then waste their time with DMCA notices and all sorts of time and money wasting nonsense like Copyscape, etc. to locate repurposed content.

The best defense, which requires ZERO opt-out codes, is standard bot blocking which is a proactive method of content control, vs. the more costly and time consuming reactive alternatives.

Besides, if you aren't already embedding your website URL in your images already you're missing free advertising opportunities with some of these sites. These busy little crowd source scrapers are freely spreading your content far and wide and if you haven't properly tagged your content with watermarks, URLs, meta data, etc. then you're just losing out on spreading the message for free. What's more, wile some of your content may be ranking above your own domain name it's probably ranking above your COMPETITORS as well! Don't forget, just because you do a DMCA take down doesn't mean your content will rise in the index because the site with all the juice that ranks above you will most likely continue to rank above you but WITHOUT your content so put your URL in that image NOW!

Also, you don't need a dynamic website in order to insert tags site wide as you can easily add a PHP handler to all HTML pages in htaccess and then run a prepended script that loads the static HTML page, inserts the meta tags, and spits out the updated page. Quite trivial to implement really.