Protect your website from being copied
People still copy websites these days. They do it even though Google punishes duplicate content. There are three benefits to copying your website content, and the three reasons why people may do it are listed on this article. Then follows a few tips on how to make your website and its content a little less likely to be copied, along with ideas on how to protect your content.

 
Copying it for a direct traffic benefit
Some people copy your content so that they can put it onto websites that are not indexed by Google. They work for getting direct traffic, which means that they do not care if their website is not indexed or ranks very low on the search engine results page.
 
A temporary search engine benefit
Some people do it because the new content helps them to rank higher on the search engines for a short period. They enjoy the short period and then remove the content when Google starts to penalize their (and your) site. They do this because they have affiliate adverts on their site. The affiliate adverts make a little money during the time that they place the content on their website and the time that they remove it.
 
Posting it onto article sites
Another trick is to set up a free email account and then set up an article account on an article website. Load a few copied articles onto the account and enjoy any affiliate money. In many cases the people who have had their content stolen will never know that it is duplicated, so the thief may enjoy affiliate advert money for a while before any action is taken by the site or the person they copied. A similar thing may be done with backlinks, where a person loads a few copied articles and links to the article sites in order to enjoy the SEO benefit before being caught.
 
Once caught, the user’s accounts are often banned, so they unsubscribe from their email and create a new account and start all over again. All three of these situations are not going to do you any favors, so it is better to try to protect your website any way that you can.
 
Put a copyright notice at the bottom of each page
This will scare of a few people who are looking to copy your content. It is mainly for the people who do not know very much about copyright and assume that the copyright notice gives you more protection than it actually does.
 
Place a notice on the page of the date that page was uploaded
This scares off the people who think that copyright exists depending upon when something was uploaded. When they see the date that the piece was uploaded, they think that it will act as evidence against them if they upload it after that date.
 
The date at which the article was uploaded is irrelevant when it comes to copyright. The person who owns the copyright may have the work copied and uploaded before he/she has the chance to upload it. But, the copyright owner is still the owner of the article, even if the owner posts it online after the person who stole it did.
 
Use CopySentry to monitor people duplicating your content
The CopyScape tool has a CopySentry function that will monitor your pages routinely to see if they have been copied elsewhere. You do have to pay for the service and it only checks the pages that you tell it to. If you set it up then it will notify you if someone uploaded content that is as little as 5% similar to your content. There is little point in checking on the pages that do not have much content, or the pages that are unlikely to be copied such as your “about us” page.
 
Send a cease and desist message to the article sites that hold your content
The people who upload your content to article sites are banking on the fact that you will never find out that your content has been copied. The article sites themselves are often unaware that the content has been copied.
 
When you send a cease and desist message, they will take the article offline out of good practice, without doing any further checks as to whether the piece is plagiarized or not. Try to find the content that has been copied and send a letter telling them to take it down due to copyright infringement, and you will often have a lot of luck, unless the site is run by the person that stole your content.
 
This post is written by Kate Funk. She is a professional blogger and writer at www.english-educator.com. She specializes in topics of interest to techno geeks and networking enthusiasts.