January 29, 2008...6:37 pm
Tracking Content Theft
When you run a blog, people often steal your content and republish it on their own site so that they have more content to help create advertising revenue. A lot of this process is automated so the thieves never actually read the content. The great irony is that this article may well be “lifted” for use by someone else and will be appear on some other blog’s home page in a few hours. So if it doesn’t say BlueClock on the banner above then this is probably a stolen story.
But that’s another story….
Monitoring Your Content
There are a couple of useful tools out there that can help you keep tabs on who’s doing what with your web content. These methods help you see where you are legitimately mentioned, ripped off or have had your content re-worked into something that closely resembles your work.
Google Alerts
Google have a service that will send you an email whenever new content matching your criteria has been indexed.
For some blogs (including this one) that can be a matter of minutes after being published. I therefore usually create an alert for the title of the article and then receive emails on a daily basis. If you are entering a complete sentence such as an article title, then you need to put it in quotes.
Alerts can be set up at www.google.com/alerts and you can choose to receive emails on each individual alert on a daily, weekly or as it happens basis.
You can also use Google Alerts to monitor topics that you are interested in generally.
Copyscape.com
Copyscape is a paid for service, but they allow you to check a few pages per day for free. Copyscape works on a different basis to Google Alerts in that you supply it with a page on your website or blog and it will hunt for pages which have a high similarity. It will find duplicate pages and copies of your article which have been rewritten in an attempt to disguise them.
So if you see your own work on the web from time to time hopefully these two tools will help you track it and do something about it.
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