One of the main concerns that anyone who builds a website has is that someone will steal their content. This worry of course leads to the question as to whether or not it is actually possible to stop people from taking the content and using it on their sites.
The truth is that there really isn’t very much you can do to prevent someone from copying your content. Anyone who has any kind of word document software can simply copy and paste the content of your website then turn around and put that content on their own site and there is not a lot anyone can do to stop it.
Copying is the Way of the Web
Given the fact that it is virtually impossible to stop someone from copying the content on your website the obvious question is what you can do about it when it happens. The first thing you need to ask is does it really matter if someone does?
The truth is that while you can’t stop people from copying your website, it also really doesn’t matter if they do. In fact is some ways it can be beneficial to your website if someone does copy your content.
Copied Content Helps Page Rank?
The reason why it doesn’t matter if someone copies your content and that this will actually help your page ranking. You may be wondering how this can be possible since a large part of any page’s rank is the content it has, but it’s true.
The reason your page rank could go up if someone copies your content is because when most search engines run across identical content they by default rank the older page first. This means that since you put your content up before someone copied it, your page will get a higher ranking.
In fact because of the duplicate content your page will also benefit from having higher amounts of target markers on more pages which most search engines see as a sign of a pages relevance to the search terms it is working with.
Still Protection is Needed
Does this mean you should go out and give your website’s content away? Absolutely not, that is still content you own and you should take steps to protect it, but if people are copying it then you also don’t need to worry about it.
By copying your content they are doing you a bit of a favor. Also if they are copying your content this means that you probably have something good there and might want to give some thought to providing more of what is being copied.
You really can’t do much about people copying your content and while there are laws to prevent copyright infringement, these laws are easy to work around and it can be difficult to prove that someone has actually stolen your property in the first place.
For this reason, it really is best to look at the reasons why someone copying your content doesn’t really matter. If you are truly concerned about your content being copied then the best thing you can do is to constantly update and change the content on your site.
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License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned