Keep Your Website Content Unique: Battle The Pirates That Are Stealing Your Content

You’ve worked hard to create some great content for your site. You’ve done all the right things. You’ve written original articles that are great for users and are optimized for excellent search engine placement.

Everything seems fine until you start to do some searches to see exactly how well your content is performing. You look for a few of your articles and find websites from here to the Ukraine that are posting your articles.

Why keeping your content unique to your website is important

This is a problem. The value of your content is instantly diluted or maybe even totally lost when other websites copy it. Here’s why:

• Your branding is threatened. Suddenly you’re no longer the sole source of the information you have provided. Readers will not recognize you as the authority. Most will assume that the information originated at whatever website they first found it.
• Your bottom line suffers. If you have a product or service that you’re selling, someone else will be able to swoop in and take a slice of your market share.
• You slide down the search results pages. Sites that pirate your content may end up ranking above you within the search results, especially if they are more establish sites with more backlinks. While it’s true that search engines try to determine where copy originated, it’s a tough task and they often fail.
• You risk being penalized. If the search engines think your site is mostly duplicate content, you could be algorithmically penalized for having what the search engines think is a low quality site.

You don’t want to suffer any of these nightmares so it’s vitally important that you keep your content unique to your website and prevent the content thieves from swooping in and doing a major copy and paste job on all your hard work.

Copying web content without permissions IS stealing and it IS illegal

Let’s get one fact out of the way: stealing your web content is illegal. It doesn’t matter what excuse someone gives you—it’s against the law. I’ve had people claim that because they weren’t using it to sell something it was okay for them to repost my content. That’s just not true.

You may have a article pirate say something like, “Hey sorry, but you didn’t have a copyright notice posted, so it’s fair game.” Again, this just isn’t true.

Here are the facts:

• Virtually everywhere, and certainly in the United States, you are protected the moment your publish your material and it doesn’t matter if you publish to paper or electronically to the web. If they don’t believe you just send them here.
• There doesn’t have to be money or profit involved. Even if the website isn’t selling anything, it still can’t steal your articles. Small sections of articles can be quoted or referenced for news reporting, reviews or educational purposes. But lifting large sections or whole articles is definitely against the law.

Scare the pirates away before they attack

Just like mom used to say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so even though you don’t need to post a copyright notice on your pages, do it. You’ll be eliminating one excuse a future thief might throw back at you. You should also consider a Copyscape badge.

Track the pirates down and bring them to justice

But let’s face it, that won’t stop all the people who are too lazy to create their own content. Here are a few steps to take once you’ve discovered that your articles are popping up like weeds all over the Internet.

The idea is to start at the source and if you don’t get results, start turning up the heat and branching out. First send a nice email to the site explaining the situation and asking them to remove your content. Always be very polite – many webmasters are simply ignorant of the fact that copying content without permission is stealing. You may get results by politely asking them to remove your content from their site.

If that doesn’t do it, send a “cease and desist” letter via registered mail. If the owner of the website doesn’t remove your copy after receiving the letter, send one to the webhost. Unless the offending website can prove that their site owns the content, the webhost is required to remove it.

Finally, if all else fails, pick up the phone and call a good lawyer. You can sue to have the material removed and the thief might also be forced to pay restitution.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-unique-battle-pirates-stealing-your-content/29632

How to Write and Format Web Content

Web Content Writing is not like writing a college paper (thank goodness), which means you probably don’t have a lot of practice at ideal formatting. Unlike the world of academia where literally millennia have gone into developing forms and formats, webpages have only had a couple brief decades to find their bearings. To help those still in the early phases of writing web content (a.k.a. the phase of confusion and panic), here is a basic checklist to go through before publishing work.

Are My Sentences Too Long?
Every sentence will express a very different thought, so variation is natural and even good in writing. However, sentences that extend too long will simply confuse and infuriate readers. Try to keep your sentences no longer than about 40 words, which equates to about two lines in average web publications.

Are My Paragraphs Too Long?
Advice varies on how long paragraphs should be, but the general consensus is they should be “edible.” What this means for the standard user is typically somewhere around three to five lines of text, or roughly 50 to 100 words. Variation is certainly acceptable, but it shouldn’t extend too far beyond the crunch three to five lines.

Are My Sentences Too Complex?
Are you using several independent clauses, all joined together, one after another, in a series of commas that seems to never end, running on forever like it’s being chased, kind of like I’m doing now; perhaps it doesn’t even end with a typical period but instead continues, frivolously, self-interjecting, whisking around – like it’s beating brownie batter! – and, in the end, doing nothing more than confusing all your readers. There can be something elegant and beautiful about complex sentences, but they diminish reader comprehension and patience.

As a general standard, try not to have more than two independent clauses in a sentence (that will usually mean no more than one comma) and use abnormal punctuation sparingly. Sentences that are currently too complex can easily be re-cast into multiple sentences or slightly new phrasing.

Are My Headlines Active?
Drawing readers in is even more important on the Web, where the article title may be all some potential visitors have to go off of. Make your headlines interesting and active by including numbers (such as 6Plot Threads Famous Movies Forgot to Resolve), clear indications of the use of the information (such as the “how to” mentioned in the title of this article), and energetic adjectives (such as The World’s Creepiest Plants).

Is My Headline Too Long?
The headline should only take up one line of text, which means that it shouldn’t exceed about 50 characters (assuming you’re using a standard H1 tag size). That’s roughly six to eight words of content, varying pretty broadly dependent on how long the words you use are.

Do I Have an Introduction?
Even with the best headline in the world, you will want to introduce the content to come. This can be anything from a two line summary of what you’re about to say to a five line background on how the industry was started. The point is that you should prepare readers so that your direction and organization are both clear before you present your data, arguments, or other content.

Have I Proofread This Piece?
Nothing says “I don’t care” quite like a blatant tiepoh in the middle of your piece. Most people require at least a couple proofings before they catch all the errors, and even then some are bound to slip through. Make sure you’re taking the necessary precautions by doing your due diligence even after the final paragraph is written; just because you’ve finished writing doesn’t mean the article is complete.

Am I Inviting Feedback?
While it won’t always make sense to do so, most places where you are publishing web content probably allow for reader comments. Capitalize on this by inviting users to leave comments. The most effective approach tends to be providing one or two specific questions to stir conversation and get the ball rolling.

Keep in mind, as a rule, that rules should regularly be broken. What about you? Which of the above rules is it nearly impossible for you to prevent yourself from bending in each article?

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-checklist-how-to-write-and-format-web-content/28754/