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I have a friend who is a teacher. One year he was teaching a group of eighth graders and the first time he gave them a paper to write, about a third of the kids plagiarized material they found on the Internet. It was easy for him to spot the culprits. Suddenly their papers would be using college level vocabulary. A quick spot check on Google confirmed his suspicions.

His students got zeros on their papers, but if they worked hard for the rest of the term, they could make it up. However, if someone steals content from your website, it’s not always so easy to bounce back and you have a lot more at stake than a middle school grade.

When content scrapers help themselves to articles on your website it can hurt you in several ways:

• You might dilute the good will you’ve built up as you’ve established yourself as an authority in your field
• Your content will be helping your competitors beat you
• Your revenue could drop
• You may lose rankings on the search results pages

Fortunately, you aren’t helpless: there are measures you can take to discourage content scrapers.

Keeping The Scrapers At Bay

First, make sure you have a copyright notice on every page of your site. It won’t keep the worst offenders away, but it will work for people who are about to make an honest mistake. Along with the copyright notice on every page, put contact information at the end of your articles. Offer a way for other sites to reprint your material with your permission, and always require a link back to the original article when you give them the okay.

You should also include a serious warning and let would-be scrapers know that you track down and prosecute folks who pirate your material. Posting a Copyscape logo can help emphasize the fact that you take the situation very seriously. And, if you really want to add some bite to your bark you should consider subscribing to their Copysentry service.

Let’s talk about links for a minute. Make sure you have links embedded within your articles that go to pages on your website. These need to be absolute HTML links, not relative links. A lazy content scraper might not catch them when he posts your material. Readers will eventually get back to your site and you’ll also have proof that the article was originally yours. If you want to get sneaky, add a one pixel transparent image link that points back to your site.

Finally, what do you do when the unthinkable happens, when you find your content popping up all around the Internet like women claiming to be Tiger Woods’ former lovers?

How To Bring Scrapers To Justice

First, don’t just ignore it. The problem won’t go away. Take these steps:

1. Email a polite notice to the site’s owner explaining the fact that your material is original to you and protected by copyright law. Many will respond to a polite request that allows them to comply without admitting guilt or losing face. Ask that it be removed immediately.
2. Send a “cease and desist” letter by USPS registered mail. You can find good examples of this kind of letter on the web.
3. If the letter to the site’s owner doesn’t work, send one to the webhost. Webhosts are required to remove plagiarized content.
4. When you’ve gone through the previous three steps and your material is still posted on an unauthorized site, it’s time to call a lawyer.

Various patriots over the years have said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The same thing is true if your want to maintain the unique content on your website.

About the guest author:
Adam Thompson is the founder of RYP Marketing, a web marketing firm focused on delivering more leads and more e-commerce sales to small businesses. Visit their blog for more free articles and advice.