What to do about stolen content

Do you work hard writing content for your website?

Some people use automated software to steal content. The process is called ‘content scraping’.

Website owners have been concerned about the effect of scraping on their rankings.

Recently Google’s John Mueller gave an overview of how stolen content affects rankings:

“So from our point of view, other sites copying your content wouldn’t be something that would negatively affect your website. So that’s a very common situation, that sites copy content.

…if you’re not seeing those copies showing up in search for the queries that you care about then it might not be the highest priority to focus on.”

What it means is that if someone else has copied and used your content then it is not going to have any affect on your website.

There are various ways to stop others from stealing and/or using your content.

In USA one can use DCMA (The Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and ask hosting companies to take down such websites but this does not extend to sites outside USA.

You can use certain plugins from getting your content stolen such as WordFence, Blackhole, reCAPTCHA Enterprise etc.

Is your content protected?

Have you had your content stolen? If yes, what did you do? #google #website #content