Battling Plagiarism Of Your Content With Proper Attribution

Let’s face, not everyone learned the lesson back in third grade that stealing someone else’s work and calling it your own is wrong.  Either that, or people have forgotten it over the past few years.  Plagiarism of your content is something that happens every day.  Personally, I don’t have that much of a problem with someone sharing my content, as long as they give me credit for it and ask permission.

Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to give credit or even ask permission.  For the longest of times I’ve tried setting up ways to track things to find those violators, but have had somewhat a difficult time doing so.  I set up all types of Google Alerts, closely monitored my analytics and more, to try and monitor my online presence.  The problem that I ran into though is that these didn’t always pick up every occurrence and some wouldn’t remove the content without legal action which can be exhausting and expensive.

Giving Credit Where It’s Due

I’ve recently implement two different tools into my WordPress site to track my site & make sure that my content receives the proper attribution it deserves.  I feel it is only appropriate that if someone is going to use content that I have take time to create, I should at least be given credit.  There are two ways that most people will steal your content, so lets discuss solutions for each.

The first way, is some will simply push your RSS feed of content into some sort of content farm/aggregator.  These have also been called scraper sites.  People do this to constantly feed content to their site without having to do any work.  What I found to combat this type of theft is a WordPress plugin thanks to my friend Eric called Anti Feed-Scraper Message.  This plugin prevents your RSS feed from being copied elsewhere without attribution by adding a message and link to your original post that you can also customize.  Here’s what it looks like in my Feedburner Feed:

This automatically shows at the bottom of all my posts that are being fed somewhere via RSS.  So while it doesn’t prevent scrapers from taking my content, it at least gives me credit and a backlink.

The second way that your content is normally stolen is by someone who comes and reads one of your posts and decides to copy/paste over to their site word for word.  Or, maybe they read a line in your post that they want to just use in a post they are writing.  These kinds of things happen every day, and unfortunately most the time we are never even aware of it happening.

A great new tool I just recently implemented onto my WordPress site here called Tynt, addresses this completed and provides you with some awesome analytics in addition to an automatic backlink to the original post or page of content on your site.  What is really cool with tynt, is that it allows you to set it down to a minimum of only 8 words copied to insert the tracking and backlink.  What I like even more, is that it doesn’t matter if the content is copy/pasted to another site, Facebook, or an email, it will place the backlink to the original content here on my site.

Test this one out.  I dare you to copy/paste any paragraph from anywhere on my site.  It will automatically add a backlink to here no matter where you share it.

Tynt also provides you with some really great analytics of your site and content that is shared.  It will show you how many times it’s happened, number of pageviews that resulted from it and more.  They also have tracking tools for social media that will show you how many times your content is shared via E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  This data can be very valuable in helping you determine which networks are the most beneficial to your business and are working the most effective.

So if you are like me and want to make sure you get the proper credit for the hard work you put into your site writing new content, check out these two options and install them today.  As a side benefit of the proper attribution, you also will start to build some backlinks to your site that can really help with the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your Custom WordPress site.

Installing Tynt on your website does take a slight bit of technical skills, so if you need help with setting it up and installing on your Custom WordPress Site, feel free to contact me and we can take care of it for you.