Content theft is one of the biggest problems faced by many webmasters nowadays, some claim that content theft is not something to be worried about as search engines tend to give the original content more value over others, but still there are some occasions where I found duplicate contents rank high over original contents, especially the site which duplicated your content has high PR and old domain name, there are also cases where people tend to steal your pics and its url and use it on their site which might very well play a role on your over all bandwidth. So in order to avoid these consequences its better to safe ground your blog against content theft and there are simple ways with which you can achieve this.
1. Disabling Indexing Of your Images in Robots.txt:
This is something that is totally left to you, some people argue that people who do image search are the ones who want to steal your images, but there are people who feel happy that people visit their site through image search feature in various search engines. so if you prefer not to index your images or you don’t want people to steal your images from search engines then its advisable to block search bots from indexing your images by giving some special instructions in robots.txt file. You can prevent indexing of images by including these following instructions in your robots.txt
To Disallow indexing of gif files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.gif$
To Disallow indexing of jpg files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.jpg$
To Disallow indexing of png files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.png$
2. Get Your RSS Feeds To Display Only Excerpts:
RSS feeds are often prone to abuse, I really don’t like to give out my RSS feeds to directories and other sources as they tend to use my site’s content and drive traffic using it and also they tend rank high over me for my own contents, I don’t really recommend using RSS feed directories as a way to build links to your site and there are tons of other ways available to build effective links over RSS submissions in my opinion. You can make your feeds to give out only part of the content in wordpress easily by changing your
Settings —-> Reading Settings
and by changing the each article in the feed to display only summary.
Update: As Jonathan pointed out in the comment below, fairshare.cc can be a good alternative rather than pointing your feeds to display summary which proved to have frustrated some users.
3. Block Yahoo Pipes In Robots.txt :
Using yahoo pipes has emerged to be one of the most popular ways to steal contents on sites, but fortunately you can effectively prevent yahoo pipes from stealing your content through robots.txt by including following lines in your robots.txt
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0
Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0
Disallow: /
4. Disabling Text Selection And Right Click:
I have seen many blogs do have this function enabled where they don’t allow their users to select and copy the text, also they don’t allow right click in on their pages, this effectively reduces manual content theft, although some people tend to look at the source code to take the content and page info in firefox to get the image location, but these are exceptional cases which you should not worry much about as you cannot do anything about these cases. There is a plugin called blog protector which helps you to achieve this. Check the link below for plugin.
Update: This option again is a personal choice of webmasters.
Link To Blog Protector Plugin
5. Use PictPocket Plugin To Spot Hot-linked Images:
Pickpocket Plugin does a fairly good job in locating image files that are being stolen from your site along with your url and being used on other sites.
Tags: content theft, preventing content theft
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I am Chakkravarthi, full time Blogger, webmaster and wordpress enthusiast . Apart from blogging I like to dwell in to SEO world most of the time.Use wordpress and support the open source community.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with you that disabling images from Google Image Search is a personal choice. If you use a lot of stock images (legally of course) it wouldn’t hurt to leave it on. If you make your own images or it is important to your site, you may want to consider leaving it off, though GIS may be a major means of getting traffic.
In my experience, short RSS feeds are a waste. According to Feedburner they don’t get any more clicks and the protection they provide is minimal compared to the annoyance they give users. Many will not subscribe to any short RSS feed. I would instead use FairShare (fairshare.cc) to track your feed rather than truncate it.
Your third suggestion is a good idea and one I should probably recommend to others!
Your fourth is one I strongly disagree with. I use right clicks all of the time to navigate the Web (forward and back) and there are many legitimate reasons to select text. I do it to bookmark where I am in an article and also to copy names and so forth when linking to a story. These measures make me go elsewhere.
I noticed you aren’t using it on your site and I’m glad for it.
Finally, the PictPocket plugin is a new one to me that I’m going to look at later. Thank you for the link.
On that note, thank you very much for bringing attention to this issue. Though I would advise differently in a few areas, you’ve got some great ideas in here.
Thank you very much for your work!
Jonathan Bailey´s last blog ..The Effect of the Economy on Plagiarism
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for your views on this subject, fairshare is something new to me or I never heard of but it seems interesting I just visited their site, I would try it out on of my blogs.
Regarding disabling right clicks and selecting texts, yes I don’t want my users to have any problem with selecting texts on my blogs, but there are people out there who want to have such feature enabled in their blog. Once I had this problem with one of my client’s site where our competitor used to keep an eye on our new site, as soon as we used to make a new post, he just used to steal our post and publish it on his site, of course Google indexed his content first as he had more PR and popularity and our contents were seen as duplicate of his work, Although we managed to notify Google regarding this issue and found ways to avoid the issue. There are few webmasters who tend to feel they are more secured by blocking people from selecting their texts.
Blocking right clicks is another feel good factor for those who use blogs which has lots of images in it.
I am not suggesting you should imply all the methods suggested here, the choice is left to the users to select what they like the best.
Over all I feel good that I can learn something from you, thanks for not in line with me on some points, it brings in more light and more views in to the issue which I like
and its something I am always open for from my users. I don’t expect my users to agree with all the points I make here, rather I would like them to share their own experience and views too.
Thank you so much for your comments and you got a great blog there
regards
Displaying only post excerpts in rss feeds is something that irks me cos I’m not constantly connected to the internet and so love having all my posts in my offline rss reader for reading when I’m not connected online. I really don’t see how this helps prevent content theft.
To be sincere the only reason why I’m subscribed to your RSS feed is cos I’m getting some dofollow and comment luv for my efforts.
Udegbunam Chukwudi´s last blog ..Top 5 Reasons Why I Might Not Comment On Your Blog
That’s being honest lol, thanks for subscribing to my feeds.
To your question:
There are several scripts available out there which can grab contents from several websites through RSS feeds and post them on their owner website in real time, meaning as soon as you make a post in your blog, the scrappers blog will be updated too, wp-robot can be taken as an example for this one, also there is chance that search engines like google may tend to look at syndicated content first and index them, considering your own orginal content to be duplicate. So allowing only excerpts can prevent this problem as you will hold the majority of the content.
Hope that clarifies your doubt.
Regards and have a great day!