What Can You Do If Your Content Is Stolen? Three Solutions

Posted: 25 Feb 2014 05:51 AM PST

It happens to every blogger at a certain point: their content is stolen.

The first you'll know about it is, usually, a pingback notification from a blog linking to one of your past posts. When you look in more detail, you'll realise that the link was originally an internal one – and your whole post has been reproduced.

Usually, it's through an automated system, with some low-quality, scammy blog reprinting your whole post.

Occasionally, it's by an individual who simply doesn't know better – they reproduce your post, keeping your name and probably even a link back to the original in place.

If you're not sure whether people might be stealing your content, Kristi Hines has a great post on KISSmetrics: Content Scrapers – How to Find Out Who is Stealing Your Content & What to Do About It.

So what can you do?

You've got three key options:

Do nothing at all
Contact the blog owner
Contact their web host

Here's how they break down.

#1: Do Nothing At All

If you want, you can simply ignore this theft. It may make you angry, or upset – but you may decide that it's not worth wasting your energy pursuing it.

The blogs stealing content in this way are invariably very low quality, and unless they're outranking you on Google for your own posts, you're unlikely to lose traffic as a result of them reprinting your post.

It is possible, however, that if you get lots of links from low-quality blogs, Google may penalise you because it thinks you're buying links or exchanging them. (Alternatively, you might find these links actually help your rankings – but personally I definitely wouldn't count on that.)

#2: Contact the Blog Owner

In situations where you can find contact details, emailing the blog owner is usually enough to get your post removed.

Keep in mind that the person stealing your post may simply not know any better. They could be quite young, or very new to blogging. You don't need to threaten legal action at this stage (though if they refuse to remove your post, you might want to).

#3: Contact their Web Host

By law, web hosting companies like Dreamhost and Hostgator have to take action against sites that are infringing copyright. (Your posts are automatically copyrighted when you publish them on your blog, unless you explicitly license them for reuse under Creative Commons.)

To get a site (or a post on it) taken down, you need to submit a DMCA Notification to the webhost. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

You can find the host company by searching on whois.net for the domain name – look for the "whois server". On the company website, search for "DCMA takedown" or similar. Here's DreamHost's instructions, for instance.

You can also submit a request to Google to remove the content from their search engine.

Note: The DCMA may not apply in your case if you and/or the site stealing your content are outside the US. Read Do DCMA Notices Work Outside the U.S.? for more details.

Personally, I've never had to escalate to #3 – I've either ignored content scraping or I've emailed the owner to ask for my content to be removed.

I'd always advise contacting a site first before submitting a DCMA Notification: it's probably much quicker, and in some cases, the site may have stolen your content unwittingly.

(This actually happened to me earlier today – I found out that a blog I read had published an article from a guest poster that was heavily based on one I wrote two years ago. The host blog had acted in good faith and believed the article was unique. A quick email to them sorted it out.)

Has your content ever been stolen? What did you do about it? Share your experiences in the comments.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Black Hat vs White Hat SEO: What You Need to Know

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 08:25 AM PST

You've probably noticed that the internet can be a bit like the Wild West.

Newbies ride into town regularly – often with high hopes of getting rich quick. Perhaps you're one of them (or perhaps you can at least remember those days).

"Snake oil" salesmen make outrageous promises about how their product can solve all your problems (usually with a heavy dose of yellow highlighter, and a few fake countdown timers).

And just like in the West, there are goodies and baddies – "white hats" who obey the law and "black hats" who break it. In fact, you may well have heard of "white hat SEO" and "black hat SEO" already.

Online, Sheriff Google lays down the law – and you definitely don't want to get caught doing something you shouldn't.

So let's take a look at what you need to know.

What's SEO?

SEO stands for "search engine optimisation". It's the practice of getting your website or blog to rank highly in search engines – particularly Google, which dominates the market.

Sometimes, you'll also hear "an SEO" used to mean "a professional search engine optimiser".

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is SEO that goes against Google's rules. It results in a website that Google won't want to promote because no-one will want to read it.

Black Hat practices include:

Paying another site to link to yours.
Creating keyword-rich links using dodgy techniques, such as trackback spam.
Participating in link exchanges with sites that have nothing to do with yours.
"Scraping" other people's content to use on your site.
Using hidden text that readers can't see but search engines can (e.g. putting lots of keywords in white text on a white background).
Getting your site linked to from link farms.

(You can find a fuller list of Black Hat practices here.)

Basically, if a technique sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You can't automate the process of building links to get hundreds overnight.

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO plays by the rules. It results in a website that Google naturally wants to promote, because it's full of great content and easy for readers to engage with.

White Hat practices include:

Creating high-quality content for your blog.
Using WordPress or another solid CMS (content management system) for your site, so it's well structured.
Writing great guest posts for other blogs, putting the relationship (not the backlink) first.
Using Google Webmaster Tools to fix any problems with your site.
Crafting clear, direct titles for your posts that use the same keywords readers would use.

It might seem like a no-brainer to you that White Hat SEO is the way to go … and we agree.

Black Hat SEO may lead to some quick results … but these will be swiftly followed by a huge drop in traffic when Google catches you. (And bear in mind that Google's algorithms are getting cleverer all the time.)

As Daniel explains in Business is a Marathon, Not a Sprint, you should focus on the long-term, not on short-term results.

By using White Hat practices, you'll be sure of building a site that stands the test of time. You won't have to worry about Google updates knocking you down the rankings, and you'll also find it easy to engage in other kinds of marketing – like using social media – because you'll have something truly valuable to offer your readers.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too: are you actively using SEO techniques to get more traffic to your site? And have you ever used Black Hat methods (perhaps unwittingly) – or are you firmly on the White Hat side?

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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