How To Prevent Content Theft From Your WordPress Blog
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.
Category: Blog Seo
