Why You Need to Protect Your Blog!

Posted by AriesGDIM / Tami Highbaugh-Abdullah in Blogging, Internet Marketing, Wordpress Plugins | 4 comments

If you are anything like me you truly enjoy blogging.  You take a great deal of time to research topics, you love to share what you know to help others and you take a great deal of pride in your writing technique.   When I create a blog I get the same natural high I receive when designing something beautiful for my clients.  This is my stress reliever and a big source of joy for me.

So how would you feel after researching and writing out a blog for 2 or 3 hours and someone just decides to steal your content?  It happens everyday and yesterday it happened to me.  While checking my blog for comments, I noticed a trackback link that looked suspicious so I decided to see where it led.  I was hoping for a backlink from a fellow blogger with relevant content but instead what I found gave me a headache behind my right eye.  Someone had decided to copy a blog I had written regarding the need to update WordPress Themes.  Not only did they copy the content of my entire blog post, they copied the pictures on the blog and even copied my entire signature with my contact information in it.  I couldn’t believe it.

To make matters even worse they monetized my blog by placing “in text ad links” to almost every other word.  If you aren’t familiar with “in text ad links”, these are ads placed on words that make them look like links but when you mouse over them an ad pops up. Any link that I placed in the original blog they converted to an ad as well.  Unbelievable!!!! These people stole my blog and intend to make money on my content.

They did change some of the text, just enough for anyone to think that if I wrote that blog I was stupid or illiterate…. Either way this blog made me look like a fool and I don’t want any of my traffic going to that blog nor do I want them making money from my content.  I now also have to worry about page duplication issues, how it will hurt my search engine ranking and what if they decide to do it again?  Below I have listed a few steps to help you protect your blog.

3 Steps you can take to Protect Your Blog?

1. Include Terms of Service/Use on your blog.  If you are unsure how to do this you can visit Legal River and use their Free Terms of Service Generator.
2. Disable right click ability on your website.  Blog Protector is a wonderful WordPress plugin that disallows anyone from copying text or images directly from your blog. 
3. Copyright your blog

None of these options are full proof.  If someone wants your content bad enough, they may screen print it, actually type it out word for word or they can grab it from your RSS Feed service.

Copying someone’s content and using it as your own is a Copyright infringement and there are laws against such activities.  Enforcing these laws especially when the user is not located in your country can make things a bit more difficult.  If you happen to have a relentless trespasser you may need to take things a bit further and report them via their host service company.  You will first need to look them up and Whois.net can help you with that.

I hope you find the above information useful and feel free to add your own blog protection tips in the comments below.

Aries – Graphic Design & Internet Marketing / AriesGDIM

Tami Highbaugh-Abdullah

Creative Marketing Director

317.345.4182

Tami@ariesgdim.com

AriesGDIM.com / AriesGraphicDesign.com

@ariesgdim – Twitter

Google+ AriesGDIM

© 2011, AriesGDIM / Tami Highbaugh-Abdullah. All rights reserved. Copying and reblogging (reposting) this blog or the use of the blog post images are NOT permitted without direct permission of AriesGDIM..

Related Links

• Warning! Do Not Update Your Tweet Old Posts Plugin Just Yet!