The internet has made copying the works of others easier, and far more
prevalent, than ever before. That poses a problem for online marketers, who increasingly find that their own content has been copied, sometimes by competitors. And when another site duplicates your content, it can hurt your search rankings--especially if the search engine thinks that your site is the one that copied the material, instead of the one that has been copied from. Because of this, it is important to understand your rights and what you can do to stop people from copying your content.
Copyright infringement and plagiarism are similar terms, but are not exactly the same.
- Copyright infringement is a legal issue. It is against the law to duplicate someone's copyrighted work without their permission. And any original written content, photograph, video, song or other created work is automatically copyrighted as soon as it is published online.
- Plagiarism, on the other hand, is an ethical issue. It is not ethical to copy someone's work without giving them proper credit, whether it is copyrighted or not.
Finding Out If You Have Been Copied
The internet is a big place, and you probably won't even see that your content has been copied unless you take steps to look for it.
The most basic way to look for copied content is to take a unique sentence from your page and search for it on Google. By putting the sentence inside quotation marks, Google will only return results that contain your exact text.
You can also use an online plagiarism checker (such as Copyscape) to quickly check all of the text on your web pages.
If you have a lot of online content, though, you probably won't have time to regularly check all of it for copies. You should therefore prioritize your content and determine what items are most important to you or are the most likely to be copied. You can then focus on those pages, and perhaps even set up Google Alerts to let you know when important phrases pop up on other websites.
What To Do If You Have Been Copied
When you do find a case of plagiarism or copyright infringement, there are several steps you can take to fix the problem.
- First, determine if it really matters. In some cases, being copied may actually be a good thing, if it serves to spread the word about your product or service.
- If it is a problem, contact the site owner and ask them to remove the content they copied. If there is no clear contact information on the site itself, you can find out who owns it by doing a "Whois" search with any domain registry service.
- If that does not work, you can file a Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaint with Google and/or the company that hosts the offending website. This may result in the site being removed from search results or taken down completely, and should at least establish that your site originated the content and should be ranked highest in search results.
And, of course, all of this means that you should never be the one copying someone else's content; in the long run, it will hurt your SEO efforts.
* Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
