Content Theft: How to find out if your content has been copied?

“You can’t always depend on external sources to inform you about potential content theft.”

You might find out that your content has been copied by someone somewhere by one of your friends, readers or well wishers. This may only happen if you are lucky enough to have a huge number of well wishers spread out on all directions.

But, what about the rest of us who are lucky to get our content copied but not lucky enough to find out about it!

Well, we’ll have to depend on the following ways to find out about content copy-

1. Google search

Look it up!

Using Google search is the most simple and free way to find out whether your content has been copied by someone on the Internet. All you have to do is pick up few words or a sentence from your blog post, and copy and paste that with quotes. Don’t forget the quotes, this method will only work with quoted text from the blog post you want to check.

For example: If I want to check this article for any possible copy or theft, I’ll take a line from it and search with quotes. Like this-

“All you have to do is pick up few words or a sentence from your blog post, and copy and paste that with quotes”

Once you copy and paste the line (with quotes) on to Google, it will bring before you your post as well as copies of it (if any) on the net.

2. Internal linking

Link & connect your content.

An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, on the same website or domain. It is basically when you use links to your own posts within another post on the same website.

For example: if I put any links of my previous blog posts within this posts, then you can say I have used internal linking.

Internal linking has many benefits. It’s good for your SEO and for sending traffic to your old posts. But the benefit we are interested in is using internal linking to find out any possible content theft. Let me explain how and when it will work.

Supposing you have used internal links in a blog post which was copied and pasted by someone on some other website, you will get a notification about it. This is also known as track back notification. The notifications are also sent to you via email by your website platform.

But internal linking is not a foolproof strategy to depend on. Internal linking will only work if the person copying your content has not removed all the links before pasting it. In case any internal links are left out, you will get a notification.

Using internal linking is actually how I found out about my content which was completly copied from top to bottom. So, I highly recommend you to use it.

3. DMCA

DMCA

DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is all about protecting content owner’s rights whenever they believe their content has been stolen.

DMCAdotCOM provides a variety of tools to help detect and defend theft that may have occurred. And, they also help to prevent it from occurring in the future.

You can visit the DMCA website to check for any copied content. The website allows two free scans and after using the free scans you can opt for a monthly plan to continue using their services.

They also provide few other useful services both for the paid as well as free subscription options. You can create a website certificate or badges to authenticate the ownership of your content. This will definitely keep some if not all content thieves away from your content.

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It is highly recommended that you check for copied content from your website on a regular basis. You can’t depend on external sources to inform you of any potential content theft. It’s true that some bloggers have come to know about content theft from other people, but the number of such bloggers is almost too little.

If you want to protect your content: the result of your blood and sweat, (that’s no exaggeration for genuine bloggers/ authors) you will manage to make a little time and money (if need be) for that.

In most cases, you won’t need to use your money but you will be required to use some of your time and a good amount of your grey cells!

Learning how to find out if your content has been copied is a task. And, even though it will add to your (probably) very busy list of tasks, it is essential. It is the most important step in the process of protecting your blog content against content theft.

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This series is also available as an EBOOK on Amazon. You can access all the information on Content Theft & Content Copying, organized & well put together in one place.

Start reading it for free:

“Content Theft: The Undesirable Event in the Life of a Blogger”

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As always, Thank You for reading :)