Forum Moderators: phranque
What I've done is copied out select unique sentences from my articles and pasted them into Google to see if anyone else was using them. If they did, I asked them to take it down, or to give me the credit for it (since it is my article, after all). Is there a better way to find out if other people are using my articles?
The best thing you can do is have an extensive copyright page, and make sure to include copyright information at the bottom of each page.
Also, if you think that people might want to use your articles, provide a link where they can contact you asking for permission to use it. :) Tell them you don't mind, as long as they ask for permission first.
That way your visitors are less likely to steal what's yours.
I am not 100% sure on this but, I have been to sites where when you right clicked on the page it would not let you. It gave some sort of (you can not right click on this site.) Someone may be able to give you the code for that, but I just dont know it. The down side is someone could still type it out by hand and get your content. Other than that this topic has been brought up many times in the past and with the same results. There is not a whole lot you can do about theft of your information.
If I were you I would just check the top pages and see what you came up with. In the case you did come across some stolen information you could ask them to either give credit or remove it.
I have let people use content before, just asked them to link back to my site to give me credit or it would be a legal issue that I would have to take up with them. I gave them the simple choice of adding a link and keeping the content. No problems so far.
I agree that you should put your copyright tag on each page, linking back to a copyright page.
Best thing in my opinion is to let people know that they need to ask your permission to use the content, and provide credit for its use.
;)
Thor
Another place you can often find people who republish your material is in your referrer logs. Many sites don't want to spend the space or bandwidth hosting my images or video, so they just link mine to show up on the page.
Now here's a difficulty that I have - most of the sites republishing my stuff are skating sites in Korea, and I can't read what they are writing. Hehehe, that bugs me a bit because I'd really like to see what they are saying.
At least most of them have already linked to me, but for the one or two that don't, I'm not sure there's a lot I'm going to be able to do about it because of the communication barrier, at least not without spending money. I'm not going to do that because my site is only a hobby site.
As you say, a link back is better than nothing, and you can't stop them taking material anyway.
We publish articles weekly and when they get picked up by Moreover or other sites they send ALOT of traffic.
You have to make sure that you get that link back to your site.
Copy your article text into a graphics program and save it as image. Then place the article text in the alt tag.
It works just not overly search engine friendly.
If you write your articles right, they are a great source of web site content...this proposed strategy would kill that.
Continue to write good content, take the time to occassionally "search" for your own articles and keywords. Vigilance will reveal any "borrowers." Then deal with the situation accordingly.
I wouldn't look at it as a bad thing that people are using your articles, as long as you get a link back.
I wouldn't look at it as a good thing. It's very good in small doses. It's a bad thing as far as I'm concerned because, while the link is good for me as a gateway into my site from other related sites, I'd rather that they were reading the content on my site so that they associate the content with it and go back in the future.
I agree with many of the posters that letting them reprint part of my article and linking back is optimal. That way I get the link back, the eyeballs, and the bulk of the content associated with my site. The other site that links to mine will be less reluctant to cut out half of the article than to take it out entirely, so I think this method is optimal.
