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How to Protect your Blog from Plagiarism

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Guest Post by Sandra Miller

After investing that much time and effort in creating fresh, interesting and completely unique content for your blog, it would be best to also make sure your posts are protected from being stolen by other blogs or websites without properly crediting you. Plagiarism is a big problem on the Internet and search engines, particularly Google, are doing everything in their power to put their control over it, so their users can receive only the best and most useful results when searching their queries. If you were wandering what you can do to protect the content on your blog from being plagiarized, here are few tips to get you started:

Add a personal touch to your writing.

You can make your content even more unique and original by adding a personal flavor to it, sharing some personal examples or experiences to back up the factual information included in your blog posts or mentioning unique things that happened to you. Make your posts more about you and your blog, your passions and interests, and the plagiarists won’t be able to copy and steal your work that easy. For example, write a post about how you designed your blog, but describe your personal story, include pictures and share the problems you’ve encountered to make it harder for plagiarizing.

Look for things that boost your creativity and use it when writing your posts.

Before you write your first sentence think about the topic and write down your thoughts and creative ideas. One of the most important things is that your writing is completely original and yours because readers aren’t interested in reading something they’ve already seen somewhere else. Instead of copying other people’s work, take different ideas, mix the sources, extract the facts and put your own experience in the context presenting fresh views and ideas.

If possible, avoid writing short blog posts.

Plagiarists are less likely to replicate a lengthy article that reaches 1000 words count or more, so in order to protect your work from plagiarism it is recommended that you make it a habit to more often write longer posts for your blog.

Always check your content on plagiarism checker.

Before publishing check the originality of your writing on plagiarism checker. Upload the text file or copy the content in the box and after scanning the unique checking algorithm will deliver you a plagiarism report with highlighted used sources and copied sentences. It is a great tool that you can also use if you have other writers creating content for your blog to ensure their writing is completely original.

Copyright the content on your blog.

According to copyright laws your blog content is protected the moment it is published, but you can also mention at the bottom of each page that all original content is copyrighted by you, adding in the year you started your blog and the current year. This is more than enough to show potential stealers how you feel about plagiarism. If you want to go further, you can register your blog with the U.S. Copyright Office, create a Creative Commons license, or even a separate page on your blog just for your copyright notice, but you don’t actually need to do all that.

Leave watermarks on your images.

If you use your own photos on your blog that you don’t want any other blog or website to use, you can consider leaving a watermark on them with your blog name or address on the top of the photos. This is great if you are linked to websites like Flickr or PhotoBucket which people usually use to search for images. Adding watermarks is easily done in any photo editor; just don’t forget to choose the option medium to high ‘dpi’ before saving the image to preserve the quality of the picture.

Disable the right-click function for your blog images.

If you are using WordPress blog platform you can prevent your visitors from using the right-click function to download your photos or content with their CopyProtect plug-in, but you should also know that this way your readers won’t be able to use your html coding for your button.

Embed ‘Protected-by’ badges and Copyright-proof plugins on your blog.

With these plugins and badges you are certified as the original owner of the copyrights of all your blog content, clearly showing the potential plagiarists that if they copy your content you will take the required actions against them.

Regularly monitor your blog content on duplicate content checker PlagSpotter.

If you enter the URL of the webpage you want to check in PlagSpotter’s search box, the software will scan the content and deliver a report including its duplicates. You can also regularly monitor your web pages and get immediately informed if someone copied and used your content on other blogs or websites. This is truly an effective tool for protecting your blog content.

Contact the plagiarists.

If your blog content has been stolen, contact the stealing website through email providing all the needed information to show that your blog is copy protected and to proof the content has been plagiarized. Ask them to either credit you properly linking back to your blog, or to remove the copied post from their website.

Blogging is about exploring your creativity, so explore, go research the topic, put your personality into your writing – this way you’ll best protect your blog from plagiarism.

Sandra Miller is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, loves writing social media tips. You can reach her at Google+

 

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20 Responses

  1. Cora Harrington

    My work is constantly plagiarized. So long as there are people out there who would rather not write their own articles, your work is always subject to being scraped, stolen, and spun.

    I will say that long blog posts as well as short ones get plagiarized, and that disabling right click in a world of screenshots and html page info is just a feel-good measure. And once your blog reaches a certain size, you literally will not have the time to go after every single person who copies your content. It’s impossible.

    Instead, focus on the one thing the plagiarizers can’t copy…being yourself and constantly coming up with new content. It’s a better use of your time and resources.

    Reply
  2. Chaucee from Streets and Stripes

    Watermark on my images have saved me so many times! Theoretically, people CAN just crop it out, but as a professional photographer I do appreciate the semi-portection that watermarks offer.

    Reply
  3. Tara

    Good points in this post.

    On the note of writing long posts — I’ve read somewhere that people don’t tend to actually read longer posts…?

    Reply
  4. Monica

    Thanks for the information. I checked plaspotter and it even shows the people who have reblogged my posts.

    Reply
  6. Keiran Kainth

    Hi,

    Thanks for the useful advice. It’s so important to try and protect all your hard work but can prove very difficult. It’s just so sad that some people haven’t got the creativity and imagination to create their own content.

    Leanne & Keiran x

    Reply
  7. Stella Kashmoney

    Thanks for the tips, I will be keeping an eye on my precious content from now on.

    Reply
  8. E-M

    This article helped me A LOT! Since I’m a new blogger and don’t have that many followers, I haven’t even thought about having that problem. All the ideas for my posts come just out of the blue (like outfits and so on) and all the other ideas just pop into my head – sometimes after seeing some pictures etc. Then again I’ve never thought that someone could actually use all of that against me and use it in a bad way .. Maybe it’s naive but I believe in goodness of people 🙂 But this article gave so many great tips that I will definitely use from now on and concentrate on copyright!

    Reply
  9. Jonelle

    I literally just wrote a blog post about how this happened to me! My question is what happens if after you’ve contacted the person stealing content and asked them to take down the post or give credit and they do neither of those things? In my case somebody stole an entire DIY tutorial that i created and they took my images and reposted the entire thing in full and took credit for it on their much bigger blog. it got shared all over facebook and social media and the credit went to them even though it was my content. I asked them to take it down or give credit and they didn’t.

    Reply
  10. Stephanie

    Informative post- I never thought about plagiarism until now. I checked plagspotter and found out that I’ve been plagiarized! Sad that someone would rather copy the work of someone else and not give credit where credit is due. At least I’m conscious of it now.

    Reply
  11. Sentinel

    Yes, it will be a great idea to get adapted to a software that can perform duplicate content check with accuracy and speed. It will certainly help getting rid of plagiarism issues.

    Reply
  13. Anuradha Sarkar

    Some good points triggered. @ Stephanie you are not alone, similar things happened with me too. I have shared my experience here in:
    betaout.com/blog/how-publishers-can-deal-with-the-problem-of-plagiarism/

    Reply
  14. George

    This has become a real disturbance for many people. Only plagiarism checker is the only solution to the problem.

    Reply
  15. Paraphrasing Service

    Plagiarism is deemed as a serious offense and unethical act in all fields of life; whether you are a student, business professional or writer, using plagiarized material is considered as a severe crime all over the world.

    Reply
  16. Peter

    Plagiarism has been a serious problem ever since the internet became a part of daily life. Once a text has been uploaded onto the web, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to enforce property and copyright restrictions. Identifying the original author of a given work has become increasingly difficult.

    Reply
  17. Jessica

    If protecting your online content is a serious concern of yours check out http://www.searchlig.ht/. We are a relatively new company that aims to keep your unique content as yours alone! If you’re at all interested, please feel free to E-mail me at [email protected], I would love to hear from you!

    Reply
  18. Roberta Kautz

    Thank you – very informative. Having been a high school teacher, I am aware that many students and (to my surprise) parents take plagiarism lightly and do not consider stealing. Because my blog content is on the subject of Christian meditation and Sabbath keeping, I do not anticipate a huge problem with this, but realize it is something I want to prevent.
    My blog is: http://www.Christianquietude.wordpress.com

    Reply
  19. Katie

    This article has some timeless advice! I’d say disabling righ-click is one of the best and the most irritating tip at the same time. It prevents from copying things but at the same time it introduces an atmosphere of distrust towards the reader and not everyone is trying to deliberately rip you off.
    Using a plagiarism checker is also a great idea, I use http://copyact.com/ which works automatically for me. I just get reports regularly everytime someone plagiarises my content.

    Reply
  20. Avantika Gupta

    Hi,

    I think the best way to prevent content from being stolen is not to post any contents. You can waste a lot of time preventing, but the thief will still have their ways if your content is valuable.

    The good thing about Google Panda is to block off these thieves, unless they are getting traffic from elsewhere.

    Thanks

    Reply