Using graphics to help prevent ripping off

Is it doable?

[HRoth]

I have had a lot of experience with folks ripping off my ecommerce site text, since there's a lot of it, but building a site just for content is new to me. I've been reading this forum for a couple years now in hopes of learning about content sites and have collected a bunch of what seem to be good tips that I am trying to apply to the four sites I am now working on. One thing I considered that I haven't seen discussed is putting parts of the text into graphics--not just single words, but blocks of text. Most of the people ripping me of (so far) have not been very sophisticated. A few have ripped off the whole site and turned it into a book or a torrent; them I am going to try to defeat with htaccess and absolute linking (hope I have the right term). But those who do a drag-and-drop type ripping off, I am wondering if by using a graphic of parts of the text that I can aggravate them enough to deter them from doing a lot of stealing. Has anyone tried this?

I've also been thinking of chopping up the content into much smaller pages than I have on my ecommerce site, more like one screen per page instead of 2-3 screens per page, so it is more tedious to drag-and-drop (but not too tedious for the reader and hopefully good for ad placement). Does that help? I anticipate these sites having several hundred pages each. There is a lot of ripping off in my niche, but it is mostly by either merchants or amateurs who simply want to appear to be knowledgeable on the subject, so I am not sure how sophisticated I have to be about preventing it. I could sure use any suggestions.

[StoutFiles]

Putting text into images will increase load time and that text won't be indexed by search engines. And even then, people will still steal the content.

[HRoth]

It will increase load time, but my sites are not going to be graphic-heavy and I can use gifs or I think there is another graphic file that is more compressed. File type begins with a p? I am planning on putting some of the text in the graphic in the alt tag. These are going to blocks of text, not the whole text.

[outland88]

You’re looking for a quick answer to copyright infringement and there are none. Something like you mentioned could hurt you more than help you and the expense in time could be large.

The best thing to do is set up an excellent form letter to be faxed directly to Google. Normally they’ll knock the offending page out in 12-48 hours. If you want the ultimate in revenge send it to Yahoo. Yahoo has a “zero tolerance” policy and removes the whole site.

Once you set up a streamlined process word will spread you mean business. Plus mainly look for the sites that have displaced you at number one when you do a snippet search. Most scrapers don't hurt you much less help themselves.

I also caution people to know what copyright infringement is. If it just looks like some of your ideas it likely doesn’t qualify. If it looks exactly like your writings it likely is. In some areas information is just rehashed a thousand different ways giving the appearance of infringement when it is not.

If you haven’t filed at minimal 100 DMCA’s I don’t see any large problem.

One of the newer things I have seen is hosting companies deferring the complaints to Google. In other words they suggest you send the complaint to Google first if it involves Adsense on the pages. Bottom line is lot of time can be wasted by attempting to contact the site owner or the hosting company. Personally I feel you should have a minimum amount of DMCA’s filed with Google in case somebody files a class action suit against Google Adsense. Plus quiet a few people request the return of the “ill gotten gains” in the DMCA if it involves the Adsense program.

[tangor]

Text as images does have some use... but does prevent the SEs from finding your content for indexing... and thus exposing your site in the serps. Might be more trouble than it's worth.

[HRoth]

My problem is not just that people take pages and put them up online, like to sell products on ebay or in their own shops. I think that most of them would probably be flummoxed by finding out that part of the "text" is a graphic. That is what I mean by not sophisticated. But I also want to stop people who take my site and self-publish it as a book and/or package it as a torrent. I want to make it harder for them to do that with these new content sites.

[enigma1]

I think the problem you are describing is done by scrap bots therefore it's fully automated.

It's not that a person comes to your site copies and pastes the content elsewhere page by page. If you are looking for an alternative perhaps having an HTML post form with a nonce and a button has to be clicked in order to read the full page content will be adequate for what you need.

Of course such methods will not allow SEs to index the full content but it maybe easier to manage, than using images and you will use the same resources. (no extra server connections or server b/w increase)

[HRoth]

Hmm. That's a possibility.

I guess I am not going to find any real way to do this. It's aggravating. Still, with these sites, since they will be content only and not shops, at least defending the copyright will not be interfering with sending out orders and answering the phone and whatnot, like now.

[damon_cool]

I use Oracle documentation frequently in my line of work. They have a site that is full of information about Oracle. They charge a pretty penny for support. A key piece of the Oracle support is their website. Oracle had support competitors that were scraping their entire site and re-posting it as their own content. So they recently moved to a completely flash based system. I really hate the new interface, it's really sluggish. But I think they have stopped the scrapers, for now.

[LifeinAsia]

So what's to stop someone from just downloading your graphics and using them on their site?