Content theft is a common problem in marketing. You write some piece of content, and another website uses bots to steal that content and post it on their own site. It’s an issue that doesn’t necessarily affect your status in search engines as much as some people believe, but it’s still one that can be frustrating, and in some cases undermine the work that you’re trying to complete.
DMCA notices can help you remove the content, but until then it may be in your best interests to take advantage of it. How? By adding your link into much of the content you post.
Added Link Value
For valuable content on your website, there are often plenty of ways to insert your link. You can put it in text in parentheses, like so (www.greatleapstudios.com) or you can hyperlink it to a relevant piece of text, like this example with content writing.
This action will serve three purposes:
- You’ll be able to easily identify you wrote the content in the event that a bot steals it.
- Anyone reading the content on the fake site will be more likely to visit your site.
- Any embedded links could, in theory, give you link building credit.
The latter is unlikely, but it’s possible, because Google does occasionally accidentally credit websites for incoming links it claims it avoids. Most of the time when your content is stolen, it’s stolen by bots, not by human beings. So the content is highly unlikely to be edited in any way.
Putting your link in every post is a strange way to deal with content theft, but it can be an effective one, especially if you’re having trouble getting the content removed. It’s not a perfect remedy, but it will control the effects of content theft and, in rare cases, may actually help your website succeed.
