5 Best Plugins to Protect Your WordPress Blog Against Content Theft
Content is one of the reasons why the internet community is so alive. Every day, millions of content are released on the internet. One of the problems that often arise regarding content marketing is content theft.
Plagiarism has become a serious problem in the internet world. You definitely know how easy it is for someone to grab content from various websites.
Just highlight the text they want, right-click, and copy everything. Stealing copywrite images is also very easy. Just right click and save the image. Then they can use the text and images on their own website and acknowledge it as their own.
In recent times, protecting website content has become increasingly popular. One of the foreign media, Inc. , has recently taken steps to protect their content by not providing access to website visitors who have not registered.
This makes their content exclusive and helps protect their content from plagiarism and spam.
Indeed, now you don't need to worry because Google's algorithm makes this search engine even smarter in detecting who the real content owner is. However, there is still a possibility that your content thief will rank higher than you on search results pages.
Unfortunately, there isn't really any way to keep people from stealing your content, but there are still ways you can make your content harder to copy. In this article, we will discuss some of the ways you can protect your content. But before that, let's discuss what content theft is.
Also Read: How Long Does It Take For A New Blog Post To Appear On Google's First Page
Original Content and SEO
We are sure you already know that original content is the main and most important factor in SEO. With original content, it is hoped that your website can get a lot of traffic, backlinks, and of course customers. This is one of the reasons why content marketing is a marketing strategy that is often said to be a superior and sustainable strategy.
Google itself assesses the originality of content as a measuring tool for ranking on search results pages. Previously, many blogs and websites managed to get high rankings on search results pages with plagiarized content. But now Google is making it even more difficult.
In February 2011, Google released Google Panda, which is used to monitor spam content in the Google Index and ensure that the content becomes more user-friendly. Until now, Google is still updating its algorithm so that the content that appears on the first page of search results is original content.
Content Theft Method
There are many types of content theft that are common. But there are two types of content theft that most often occur, namely content scraping and hotlinking.
Content Scraping
Most content theft uses the simple method of copy and paste to steal and copy content from other websites and then release it on their website. This method is known as content scraping.
Many websites do this and many of these websites rank higher on Google than the original website.
Actually, this is also easy to do because there are several tools that can be used to perform automatic content scraping. But you don't need to worry because now there are many tools that can be used to avoid content scraping. We'll cover these tools below.
Hotlinking
Hotlinking is using images, videos, or files that are hosted and stored on other websites in your content. What is meant here, hotlinking is when you do not upload the image, file, or video to your website and use a link from another website.
In this way, you serve this content to your website visitors and other people pay for the space and bandwidth for that content on their website.
Websites such as YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, and so on will give you permission to hotlink by giving you an embed code so that you can present images, videos, and other types of content to your website or blog.
There are also websites that allow you to upload content such as banner images to their website and provide you with HTML or Javascript code so that you can display the content on your website. This does not include hotlinking on content theft.
Hotlinking can only be considered theft if you use images and data hosted on other websites on your content without the permission or knowledge of the content owner.
Also Read: 5 Criteria For A User-Friendly Website
Tracking Your Plagiarized Content
There are several ways you can track whether someone is plagiarizing your content and putting it on their website.
One easy and free way to do this is to take advantage of Google Alerts. This tool from Google can help you track all of your original content indexed by Google. Every time your content is taken and put on another website, Google will send an alert or warning.
Using Google Alerts
Google Alerts collects search engine results based on several criteria. After gathering the results, Google Alerts will then send you a report. This can help you see what information is out there about your company, the popularity of your content, and potential competition.
You can just visit http://www.google.com/alerts or type Google Alerts on your Google page.
After that enter the keywords you want to track in the column provided. After you type the keywords that you want to use, you will see several options that you can configure to suit your needs.
- How often: How often do you want to receive reports on your keywords? You have the choice of as it happens (when your keyword is mentioned), At most, once a day or twice a week.
- Source: You can choose the type of content or niche that matches your keywords in the reports from Google Alerts. You can choose from News, Blog, Web, Video, Books, Discussions, and Finance.
- Language: You can choose in what languages the content you want to track.
- Region: This option gives you the freedom to decide the region where you want your content tracked.
- How Many: How much data do you want to get. Is it just great results or all the content that mentions the keywords you are tracking.
- Deliver to: You can choose whether you want this report to be sent to your email or RSS Feed.
If you've edited everything to suit your wishes, all you have to do is click Create Alert and you just have to wait for an alert from Google.
Also Read: Newspaper 9 Blogger Template Free Download [SEO Friendly]
Prevent Theft and Copying of Content
There are several ways you can prevent content theft and plagiarism. Some of them include:
Modify your website's .htaccess file
The .htaccess file is a configuration file that is on the Apache Web Server. This .htaccess file can be used to change the Apache Web Server software configuration to activate or deactivate additional functions and features from those offered by the Apache Web Server software.
One of the things you can do with .htaccess files on your server is protect your content from plagiarism and theft. You can add hotlink protection instructions to your .htaccess file so that other websites do not use your images or content.
To stop hotlinking, you can enter the code below in your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond% {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ $
RewriteCond% {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ Http: // (www \.) Example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \. (Gif | jpg | jpeg | bmp | zip | rar | mp3 | flv | swf | xml | php | png | css | pdf) $ - [F]
Don't forget to replace example.com with your website URL.
If you don't want to mess around with coding a website or file server, you can try the following steps.
Install plugins to prevent content theft and plagiarism
For those of you who are WordPress users, you can easily prevent content theft and plagiarism through the use of plugins. WordPress provides several plugins that you can use to turn off features or functions of your website that allow easy loading of your content.
Here are some plugins that you can use to protect the content on your WordPress website.
Yoast SEO
Maybe you are wondering why there is this one SEO plugin on this list?
One of the most common problems with content theft is auto-posting and plugins that re-release your posts on other websites without any other attributes.
This Yoast SEO plugin features an RSS menu where you can add an attribution link directly to the top and bottom of each post in your RSS feed.
Regardless of the content, there will be a special code that will allow you to add an attribution link to your RSS Feed. This is done so that every time your post is published, there will be a backlink to the original website from which the content is taken.
WP-CopyProtect Plugin
This is a great plugin for those of you who experience frequent content theft. WP Copy Protect protects your content from theft by disabling the right-click option on your website and the Inspect Element feature in Google Chrome which makes it difficult for bots to copy content from your website or blog.
Of the two, the most important thing is to disable right-clicking on your website to lock content and coding on your website. You also don't need to worry about the SEO of your website because this plugin will not affect the SEO of your website. Search engines will still be able to read and crawl your website easily.
WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click
WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click plugin will protect your blog posts from being copied and even stolen by bots. This plugin will protect your Homepage, your website posts, and your website pages with techniques such as JavaScript and CSS.
You don't want your content to be stolen and plagiarized, right? Well, this plugin can be an all-in-one content protection plugin to prevent content theft and plagiarism. This plugin also doesn't affect the SEO of your website.
Copyright Proof
The Yoast SEO plugin is not specifically designed to prevent content theft, although we found a way to use it to protect our content to some extent. Unlike the Yoast SEO plugin, the Copyright Proof plugin is made specifically to protect your content.
This plugin gives you a digital signature & certificate timestamp on every post on the website that uses this plugin. This can help a lot in proving ownership.
In addition, there are many customizable options for customizing the plugin, such as changing the color, size and more so that it suits your needs.
WP Content Copy Protection
This plugin is pretty good. WP Content Copy Protection can protect your content from theft especially from people who are not tech-savvy. Because this plugin disables copying of your content either by mouse or by keyword using ctrl + A, ctrl + C, etc.
Apart from that, WP Content Copy Protection also protects your photos by deleting the URL. This disables chrome features like; inspect elements, source code and more making it nearly impossible for bots to copy content from your site.
The best part is that this plugin works in the background and doesn't affect SEO in any way. This is a simple plugin. So just download, install, and that's it. This plugin will do its job of protecting your content automatically so you don't have to make any setup or configuration.
Also read: How To Add Yoast SEO Plugin To Blogger Blogs (Pictures)
Conclusion
Content theft and plagiarism is not something that can be left unchecked. From this article, you can see that now, with the many tools available on the internet, it is very easy for website owners to track whether anyone is grabbing their content.
That way, you can protect your content from parties who want to recognize your content as their own. You should always be careful because there are still many people out there who still prefer to take other people's content than create their own content.
In this article, we've also told you about the types of content theft that occur most often. Hopefully, you will now be able to take appropriate content protection measures to avoid content plagiarism and theft.
If you want an easy prevention method and you are using WordPress, you can take advantage of the various plugins provided by WordPress. The plugins that we have mentioned above can help you protect your content and prevent plagiarism and theft of content from your website so you don't have to worry anymore.
But keep in mind that you don't need to install and activate too many plugins. Too many plugins on a website can affect the loading speed of the website.
Hopefully this article will help you. If you know other great tools, plugins or tips, you can drop a comment using the comment box below!
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