How to Protect Your Website Content
If you've ever had something stolen, you know it's a terrible feeling.
What's worse, someone could steal your website content without you even knowing it.
You have likely spent time, money, and effort on your website content, whether it's professional photography or writing the perfect message and marketing copy.
Now imagine someone comes along, takes your content, and posts it on their website as their own.
Fortunately, several tools are available to help you monitor your website content for plagiarism. If you discover that someone stole your content, there are solutions to remedy the situation.
How to protect your images.
High-quality images are critical for a beautiful and effective website. This is especially true for portfolio-driven organizations like builders, designers, and architects.
Sadly, it's nearly impossible to prevent someone from copying images from your website, even if you use tactics like disabling right-clicking. (Which I don't recommend, as that can create other usability and accessibility issues.)
If you're highly concerned about protecting your images, adding a watermark with your logo or company name is a smart option, although often not always the most elegant.
BatchWatermark
If you want to go the watermark route, BatchWatermark is a free online tool for adding your logo or text to multiple images simultaneously.
Another useful tactic is to perform a reverse image search. Basically, you upload your photos to a service that scans the internet to see if any other websites are using your images.
TinEye
TinEye is the most reliable and user-friendly reverse image search tool that I've found, and they have helpful browser extensions to perform searches from any webpage.
The free level only allows you to upload a single image at a time, but they offer a paid service where you can upload multiple images to a library, which will continually monitor the internet for copies and report any violations to you.
How to protect your written content.
When it comes to your website, content is king. Great content impacts your SEO rankings, creates engagement, and drives conversions. But writing is hard! Unfortunately, stealing your hard-earned content is as easy as "copy and paste."
It can be a bit harder to track down stolen written content, especially if the plagiarized copy was edited slightly so that it's not the same text word-for-word. However, there are a few resources that can help.
Copyscape
Copyscape has several plagiarism tools. With the free level, you can plug in a URL and it will check for duplicate (stolen) versions of your text content.
They have paid plans that allow you to scan your entire website, as well as a monitoring service that automatically scans the web daily or weekly and emails you when new copies of your content are found.
Grammarly Pro
Grammarly Pro is another option. Grammarly is a writing assistant. It helps with spelling, grammar, tone, and overall clarity. (I use it when writing emails, proposals...pretty much any time I write.) They have a really robust free plan, but upgrading to Pro gives you additional features like a plagiarism checker.
What to do if your content was stolen.
If you find that someone has used your copyrighted content without permission, the smart approach is to talk to a lawyer. They are the best resource for advising on legal matters like this.
If you don't have a lawyer and/or hiring one would be cost-prohibitive to you, the next best thing is to send the offending party a DMCA takedown notice (free template below).
DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) addresses several digital copyright issues and provides some frameworks for addressing copyright or digital content violations.
Free Template: DMCA Takedown Notice
The DMCA specifies the language to be used in "notice and takedown" procedures, which I've put into this Google Docs template.
Just fill in your own information wherever you see text in uppercase and brackets [LIKE THIS].
I hope you find this useful. If you'd like some help with your website or marketing, schedule a free Strategy Call.
Disclaimer: The information provided here is not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available on this site are for general informational purposes only.