How to Find Out Whether Someone Has Stolen Your Website Content

It is a great disappointment for the bloggers and website owners to see the content and infographics prepared exclusively for their posts on some other websites and blogs. Without any credit given and no mentioning of the original source, it is an act of stealing! If the content is in-demand, it may look like a compliment for its creators, but it is actually a great offence and even a crime. Why does stealing content from another website happen so frequently? Few of the website owners and bloggers can exercise full-time monitoring of their content and those who take what does not belong to them frequently just get away with their trophy. Actually, it is extremely important to guard against the theft online and use plagiarism check to make sure that your content does not appear anywhere else except your website. Are you a victim of this popular crime of present-day life? Do you know how to find out if someone plagiarized and made use of your outputs? How can you protect yourself from online thefts? These are the questions you should ask on a daily basis.

Stealing Content from Websites and Social Media

You create online content to generate sales, traffic, and loyalty of your clients. It is not easy and rather expensive. Taking what does not belong to you is really easy and it does not require any investments. For sure, it is not legal at all, but those who are involved in content theft do not care.

You do the writing and editing for your own purposes, and then you get to know that some media services have used your content and made some profit out of it with no reference to you as its author! It is an outrage that has been taking place since the very beginning of the Internet as the e-commerce can bring enormous profits. You have to know how to report a website for stealing content as it is common for indecent website administrators to use the automated software and just copy huge amounts of content and increased traffic.

Someone Copied My Website! Watch It! Thieves are around!

Have you got a separate page of ‘Terms and Conditions’ on your website?
Have you made it absolutely clear about the rights of ownership on your website content?
Is there an option to click and confirm that the visitors to your website understand the terms and conditions and agree to them?
Have you ever borrowed content from other websites? Do you allow others to do that?

Check copyright website and make sure that you know how to fight the offenders.

Are You 100 % Sure They Are Actually Stealing Content?

You should start reporting content stealers or sending threats to them only after you are absolutely sure that you have figured out what has happened. Spring into action only after you have evaluated the situation and checked whether re-use of your information is actually illegal.

Some blogs or websites can refer to your website content, and that will not be treated as the act of stealing. In fact, there will be no copyright infringement at all. Everything you publish on your website is under rightful protection even without any copyright symbol, but fair use of it without any republishing is not prohibited. What you need is to draw a line between exclusive use of the materials and allowing others use some of your content referring to your website as its source.

Fight Back! Plagiarism Check Is Needed

It is crucial to know at once that certain content is taken from your websites without your permission although it is not easy to track it down as the number of websites around the globe is increasing.

A reliable plagiarism checker: what you have to do is to insert the URL of the website into the search box to get to know where you can find similar content. There are free and paid versions of tools that you can use to check plagiarism online and trace the stolen content.
Google Alerts: in case some user takes your content and places it somewhere on blogs and websites online, you get a notification. We recommend you to use not only this tool which used to be universal for all the marketers, but also get updates about all latest tools for monitoring the online content.
Search manually: you just take a specific phrase that you believe is the focus of your key piece of website content and search for it online. It is also possible to trace your unique visual content using the image search on Google. For sure, this process takes time, but it appears to be really effective.
Referral traffic: checking the marketing analytical information, you should pay special attention to the websites that give you traffic. If there are any new sources that you have not noticed before, you should spare a minute to check the plagiarism and identify your website content there.

If you are fishy about your online content and it seems to you that some of it has been copied, you need sufficient data to prove that. Use a plagiarism checker and take all necessary measures to protect yourself; otherwise, your level of competitiveness on the market will be pretty low. You will be surprised to see your own offer from other companies and your own product catalogs on the competitors’ websites. You have probably invested a lot of your time to produce a brilliant social media post to see it with a bit amended text on the Facebook page of a stranger. That happens all the time; the thing is that very often you do not notice that.

It goes without saying that it is absolutely wrong to benefit from the efforts of others. And it is just the right time to check whether you have been affected by content theft. If you are aware of the problem, you will look for solutions. There are a lot of things you can do to deal with scraped content and prevent further issues. Be careful and mind your own property!

Stealing Content from Websites and Social Media