Publishing Articles + Plagiarism
-
Everybody at some point will write a feature rich article and publish it on their website.
What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word.
If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content.Question:
Should site owners be worried about this type of practice?
How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?Any other good advice would be appreciated...
Thanks Mark
-
Doug,
You are the man, nailed it!
Robert
-
Mark, just thought I'd add to responses comments Robert and Devanur have left with some personal experience.
Content from one of my sites was being copied and republished on multiple sites, and then re-copied/re-published on more! (Some niches are worse than others!)
What I started to do was to make a concious effort to make sure I included links to other content on my site within my articles. These links were to relevant content and were referenced in such a way that editing the link out would make parts of the article meaningless.
If they leave the links in unedited (and the kind of people scraping your content aren't the kind of people who want to take time to carefully edit the content) then you'll get a link from their site back to your own.
Make sure that you use the full URL (nor just the relative path) in links within your content. This way they'll point to your site when the article is copied.
You can also add images and other media (that you reference in your article) which has your banding and/or site name on. This increases the cost in time/effort required if someone wants to pass your content off as their own.
Since I started doing this I get a small trickle of referrals who have become repeat visitors on my site. I can also find people using my content by looking at my back links profiles and analytics.
The only caveat here is that you need to be aware of where you content is being republished. You may not want to get lots of low value links or links from spammy pages.
Doug.
-
You are most welcome Mark. At some point or the other, we all (at least people who come up with original content) would have faced the content scraping or stealing issue. Its all the part of the game. Being the rightful owners of the content, we should not leave any stone unturned while trying to protect our rights for our content. Personally, I have seen the copyright notice work well with manual content stealers but, for those who use automated tools to scrape and publish content, there is no definite method to stop them. Wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Robert and Devanur,
Thank you for taking the time in writing a detailed summary on how to safe guard oneself.In particular, I warm to the idea that we can protect our content using rel=author, **rel=publisher **and https://plus.google.com/authorship
I suppose all our best attempts may never safeguard our content 100%. However, at least Google, etc will know where the article originated from. Maybe Google have some mechanics in place, to place on there radar those sites that steal content.
Thanks Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Your concerns are very much true and unfortunately there is no absolute solution for this issue.However, the following might help you face and handle the issue:
1. Use Google authorship.
This will help the search engines recognize the correct or the rightful owner of the content. Here you go for more:
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html
2. Have the copyright notices published along with the content. Give clear syndication guidelines like, an attribution in the form of a link pointing to your webpage (that the content resides on) if someone wants to publish on their website.
3. You can always file DMCA complaints right from the Google webmaster tools account.
4. You can use Google Alerts to watch out for any of your content being stolen and published elsewhere.
Here you go for more in this regard:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/find-remove-stolen-content/
Hope the above help.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Mark
I like the question and am going to handle it sentence by sentence: "What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word."
Nothing can stop anyone from doing this. Frankly, I could copy your question and put it on Moz as mine. It would probably take at least a few minutes for someone at Moz to catch it and take it down. But, nothing can stop me from doing it if I care less about the consequences.
"If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content."
First, this is an assumption many make and I do not necessarily agree with it. Second, within copyright law there are work products you can save over time that can assist you (but they are not foolproof) with a claim against someone, there are timestamps in many CMS systems that show when a doc was written, published, etc., You could resubmit a sitemap as soon as you publish, you could fetch as Google as soon as you publish (not the intent of fetch as Google, but you could), you can submit for copyright for $35US if you are in the U.S. (and if you had ten articles on the same site you could submit them all for the same $35), that submission to register would protect you, etc.
**Should site owners be worried about this type of practice? **Only if they care about:
- their site(s),
- their work,
- their client's work,
- the fact that until someone stands up to a bully, he keeps on being a bully.
_How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?_rel=author, rel=publisher
By utilizing these correctly, the moment you publish to the Internet, this is your article. Yes, someone else could take it and rewrite it, etc and then use rel=author (I know this because with the syndication services/news agencies "sharing content" we have had their authors take our content and place their byline on it - no we are not members of any syndication service so I call that theft even though the person is so used to being able to do that with articles written by others in the service they think they can do it to anyone.) but, in the end you have a record of being the one who first put it on the web and that you are the author.
Next, I think if your piece is valuable enough to you, you will copyright it. Value is your definition. With that copyright, you can report them to Google or Bing or Yahoo, etc. as taking copyrighted content and Google will eventually take action. REMEMBER - I am not talking about a copyright where you stuck a circle with a 'C' in it on your page; I am talking about a registered copyright. If they are hit with enough reports they are doing this the penalties for violating TOS can be severe.
Hope this helps you out,
Robert
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Author Credit when Using Existing Article
Hello, We have received permission from a consultant we partner with to publish one of his articles on our site (listing him as the author, of course). However, he currently has the article published on his site, so if I put it on my site will I get penalized for stealing content? Is there some sort of tagging that will provide him/his site credit? Maybe a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
Is the rel=publisher markup still relevant after google+ disappearance this year?
Hi, how would google+ disappearing after this year would affect the rel=publisher markup? Is it still relevant? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rascordido0 -
What are safe promotion techniques for articles targeting low competition keywords on a high authority site?
Hi SEO Community, The title says it all; we are running a content strategy that is targeting relevant low volume, low competition keywords published on a high authority domain. How would you design your promotion / reachout / linkbuilding / strategy in this context? Would you assume internal linking would do the job or are there easy wins to earn rankings in this low competition environment? /T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ppseo800 -
Multiple Instances of the Same Article
Hi, I'm having a problem I cannot solve about duplicate article postings. As you will see from the attached images, I have a page with multiple variants of the same URL in google index and as well as duplicate title tag in the search console of webmasters tools. Its been several months I have been using canonical meta tags to resolve the issue, aka declare all variants to point to a single URL, however the problem remains. Its not just old articles that stay like that, even new articles show the same behaviour right when they are published even thought they are presented correctly with canonical links and sitemap as you will see from the example bellow. Example URLs of the attached Image All URLs belonging to the same article ID, have the same canonical link inside the html head. Also because I have a separate mobile site, I also include in every desktop URL an "alternate" link to the mobile site. At the Mobile Version of the Site, I have another canonical link, pointing back to the original Desktop URL. So the mobile site article version also has Now, when it comes to the xml sitemap, I pass only the canonical URL and none of the other possible variants (to avoid multiple indexing), and I also point to the mobile version of the article.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
<url><loc>http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=1300357</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://mobile.neakriti.gr/fullarticle.php?docid=1300357"><lastmod>2016-02-20T21:44:05Z</lastmod>
<priority>0.6</priority>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
image:imageimage:lochttp://www.neakriti.gr/NewsASSET/neakriti-news-image.aspx?Doc=1300297</image:loc>
image:titleΟΦΗ</image:title></image:image></xhtml:link></url> The above Sitemap snippet Source: http://www.neakriti.gr/WebServices/sitemap.aspx?&year=2016&month=2
The main sitemap of the website: http://www.neakriti.gr/WebServices/sitemap-index.aspx Despite my efforts you see that webmasters tools reports three variants for the desktop URL, and google search reports 4 URLs (3 different desktop variant urls and the mobile url). I get this when I type the article code to see if what is indexed in google search: site:neakriti.gr 1300297 So far I believe I have done all I could in order to resolve the issue by addressing canonical links and alternate links, as well as correct sitemap.xml entry. I don't know what else to do... This was done several months ago and there is absolutelly no improvement. Here is a more recent example of an article added 5 days ago (10-April-2016), just type
site:neakriti.gr 1300357
at google search and you will see the variants of the same article in google cache. Open the google cached page, and you will see the cached pages contain canonical link, but google doesn't obey the direction given there. Please help! duplicate-articles.jpg duplicate-articles-in-index.jpg0 -
Of the two examples of markup (microdata, schema) code below, which of the two is better designed for its purpose of Q&A, and what might be suggested to improve upon these lines of code (context: questions and answers within article content.
ANSWER SEEN 'WITHIN THE QUESTION' BRACKET So you ask, why is the sky blue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RedFrog
Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results 'QUESTION' AND 'ANSWER' IN 2 SEPARATE BRACKETS Why Is The Sky Blue? Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results Thanks, Mark0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
Is it safe to publish 3 paid press releases in a single day?
Is it a safe bet to publish 3 PAID press releases (on PRleap.com) on the same website on the same day, each having about 10 links to different pages of the same website? I mean... will search engines spot something fishy is going out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0