There is nothing worse than putting time and effort into creating a worthwhile piece of writing only to have it stolen by another person and used on a similar site to encourage your own target audience away from you. It is easy for a rival site to just copy and paste your content as virtual law is much less respected than “real life” laws. The fact of the matter is that it is just as criminal an offense to pretend to have written something on the internet as it is in hard copy texts.

1. Copyright – It is important to make sure you add the copyright note to every page on your website, e.g. via footer. You can have “property of…..” written with your name so that people are discouraged to take any of your content, at least not without referring to your article. This then acts as unofficial marketing which will benefit your reputation further.

2. Authorship – A vital element to any written piece is stating who the author of the article is. This lets people know that the content was made by a human, which may sound foolish but users are more inclined to steal an article that is not verified i.e. could be computer generated. Your name also allows your reputation to grow and enables Google to begin ranking your sites.

3. Vigilance – Monitoring your content regularly is a positive approach to keeping your writing theft free. This can be done by typing a sentence from your article into Google, or a site catering for plagiarism such as Copyscape, using the “” marks and see has it been used somewhere it shouldn’t. If you were to stumble across a site where it has been used against your approval you can report it to Google or contact the author of the site and request that they take it down.

4. Abide by your own rules – The one thing you don’t want to be seen as being an active writer is a plagiarizer; never steal content yourself! If you expect others to leave your work alone then you cannot become a hypocrite by copying off other sites. You will lose your positive online reputation which could be extremely damaging.

At the end of the day it is extremely difficult to keep others from stealing your content but something that you can try your best to avoid. Don’t be discouraged by it, consider it flattering and take solace in the fact that other people think your writing is of such high quality that they feel they could not replicate it themselves. As long as you keep producing unique relevant pieces of writing you will gain the appreciation you deserve.

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