It can be really annoying when you run a google search for some custom keywords in your blog post and realize that certain sites that copied your content ranks even higher than you. It’s even more frustrating when you visit the blog just to see that you’re not given credit for the hard work, no backlink, absolutely nothing. Sometimes, such lame bloggers even make it seem as if you even copied them, getting credit for your hard work and sleepless nights, making money off your blog posts without feeling guilty about hurting anyone. Content thieves are everywhere, they simply copy bits and pieces from other blogs and build theirs with it. I’ve seen my blog posts appear on many sites on the internet, it makes me proud sometimes that my stuff is worth stealing but it hurts when someone takes credit for your work. This is called plagiarism and these category of people are not real bloggers, they are called sploggers (spam bloggers).
Protecting Your Copyright
In order to protect your content, you must copyright every one of your blog posts. This includes having a copyright symbol on your blog although content thieves often ignore this as most of them have no clue what it means.
You must also register your copyright. Registering your copyright involves someone that knows about the law doing that for you and that is not free. You have to spend some cash to register and protect your blog content under the law. However, I found a free service that protects your blog content by registering your copyright all for free. They give a unique copyright number to you, and registers each and every blog post you publish (with date and time of publishing). Myfreecopyright.com is what I use and every blog post i make is protected by copyright.
Although google updated its algorithm on detecting copied content and ranking original posts higher than plagiarized contents, some of them with good search engine optimization technique still manage to get away with it.
However, it must be mentioned that certain bloggers using auto blogging software cannot be totally categorized as plagiarists. Auto blogging involves creating a blog without doing anything but getting contents from other blogs’s RSS feed automatically. To make this work to your benefit, be sure to link your posts. This means you should always reference your older posts in your blog as they give you a free backlink each time your content appears on their blogs.
How To Report Content Thieves
If the blog stealing your content and infringing on your copyright is hosted on blogger or using any product by google including google adsense, you can file a complaint under Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google has a page for this where you can report content thieves.
http://www.google.com/dmca.html
You can as well report a wordpress blog to it’s host . To know the host, running a nameserver look-up will definitely help. Most web hosts have their terms of service and having contents infringing other people’s copyright might simply be a way of violating this terms of service. If you have as much dislike for content thieves as I do, then fight them and protect your creation.
