that's the nature of the beast...things get stolen on the web all the time if you take up a dispute every time some of your content gets duplicated then you're going to waste a lot of time
write your articles in such a way that even if they are 'stolen', they still do you some good, unless the 'thief' goes to real pains to get round it. EG phrase such as 'We here at www.mysite.com feel that blue widgets are superior to red widgets' mean that casual scraper / republishers will still be promoting you.
most automated scrapers just grab the whole thing. Don't put actual links in there, put the domain name, which makes it harder to automatically remove it. In the example above, I didn't actually put a link, just a domain name and the forum autoconverted it to a link. Most browsers will hyperlink 'not quite urls' nowadays. or try to.
All the above made comments are worthwhile. Bamba Boy, pull your post the "f" word gets you an infraction -- no need for that, only one person on this forum section deserves that. Exoticman: Take it as a compliment. That means you wrote an article worth stealing. Something many article writers could not experience even if they included the words "Steal me." When you really get good, they will steal your domain name, and enter it on the home page without the dot com on their page. This drives traffic through association. -------------so I would not feel too bad, to me it is a sign you are moving up------------
Since in nearly all cases they do not know how to market their site, and their stuff just sits there until they quit their site, I don't do a damn thing. Hell, they get, maybe, only a couple of hundred hits a days, if that, and with a very high bounce rate, so.... Only one time did I have to contact (called them on the phone) the hosting company. Works wonders. Try it. Well, it did for me, anyway. But notify the webmaster first. That may have him taking it off.
lol Omarbid, many times Google will not do anything. In addition to that, many webmasters could care less about Google. Me being one of them. It's worth a shot, though. exoticman, this may sound odd to you, but you may not even have to worry about it. That is, if you are.
copyscape has a function where u can put a copyright mark on your content i have never done that so i dont know what good it does but for the extreme you can contact them or their hosting provider.
Mail them, and let them know you will file a dispute with Google, to get the domain blacklisted unless *insert demand here* Always worked well for me, even got me some business, as the dude in question asked me in turn to write an original
Assuming the article in question is published online somewhere, send the offending site owner a DMCA notice. If that doesn't work, send one to their host. I've had great luck with both. Yahoo! and MySpace are also quite responsive to DMCA notices - I have an article that folks keep submitting to Yahoo! Answers and was used on a pair of MySpace blogs. All of the offending pages have been removed. Of course, this only works if the article is a pure copy or so obviously stolen as to remove all doubt. And, it's not a foolproof system but I'd much rather have one leech using my content than 20. Of course my preference is that no one use my work without my permission and I'd love to see anyone who does banned from the Internet entirely - one can dream anyway. lol The suggestion from ContentBoss is a good one. It's hard for a thief to argue with their webhost that they didn't steal my work when it contains the name of my site. Of the folks who have stolen this one piece, most left the link text in place without an active link. A few removed the reference but everything else remained.
Exactly correct. If you really read into the posts by kraven2 and YMC, you will see that you can turn it to your favor. If your article is good others will not really steal but print the whole content. If you have your name and website at the bottom they are helping you. In fact my wife's website has at least 80 articles (should have 350) showing. All have the info at the bottom. Plus the saying "you are free to reprint this information, or use it on your website only if you include full author and website credits. This in turn has gotten her an authority site status plus a lot of relevant back links. So sometimes dirty deeds done dirt cheap is needed, however do not be afraid of posting your information. Overall it will do you more good than harm. I post articles on her site that have first place Google search term rankings, the majority of times it just makes 1st place stronger with the extra links. -------------------------------------------------------always remember than a real jerk might also in revenge hack your site, or easy get your IP and infect it with a virus -------------------its your choice, there have been a lot of great options shown-------------
I'm not a fan of the author box as a means of protection - way too easy to chop off. What I mean is using internal links and the site name within the body of the article.
If I really want to track an article, here is what I do to trap the lazy content thieves: I write the article and put it online. Once there I make a screenshot of it and copy small part of that screenshot usualy a word, or small sentence. On the original article I replace that word with the image, and take care to use the full url to it. Now, a lazy content thief won't kill the image, as it still loads fine(They may not even spot it), but I can see in my stats exactly which website is loading up the image. After that the hunt is on
Way to go ! That is a great idea that anyone can use for their own articles. You should have the status of "SEO police"