How To Make It Easy To Catch People Stealing Your Articles

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I’m dealing with trying to shut down a site that ripped an article off of mine. It’s tremendously discouraging when you find your own work listed #1 on Google search, linked back to someone else’s site where it’s posted with no credit to you… and your original article doesn’t even make the top 10 pages in Google search results. I found out because I backlinked to another of my articles which was already posted. The trackback showed up in my comment moderation queue.

Stop ripoffs before they start

Here’s some techniques you can implement right now that will help mitigate ripoffs:

Treat all articles as “chapters” in an ongoing story, and link back to at least one other article which is already posted. This way you will be able to track ping backs if your article gets ripped off and posted on another blog. Here’s an example from an article on RSS at There Is NO Box. I have several of these RSS articles chained together.
Put in some personal information which will be natural for you, but totally and completely out of place when read out-of-context, say on a spam blog. I do this on one of my other website on a regular basis. For example, check out this article: linking errors in Microsoft Visual Studio (There Is NO Box).
After you have written an article, go back to a previous article and link the old article to the new. You can see that in the RSS examples from the previous point. For another example, I’ll link my existing article on teasers to this article as a reason for why learning to write good teasers is important.
Move to teaser text for RSS feeds.
Use the RSS Footer plugin, which leaves a link back to your web site if your RSS feed gets automatically scraped.
Consider requiring registration for anyone to even read good content. Registration could be free. Website In A Weekend will be moving to a membership site in the near future.
If you can, post daily. If you post daily, Google will scrape daily. Website In A Weekend’s more-or-less weekly schedule of high quality content simply opens the door for spam bloggers to steal from your RSS feed… and get YOUR article ranked on THEIR site much faster.
Post the article on digg and other social media sites. If it’s posted there immediately, and someone else resubmits, they have to cross the “originality hurdle.”
Add a liberal sprinkling of affiliate links. If you don’t catch the spam blogger, you have a chance of at least deriving some affiliate commission from the article. This will work as long as the links aren’t stripped. If the links are all stripped, you probably aren’t going to find the article quickly anyway.

Being ripped off, if left unchecked, takes food out of my mouth. I would have to stop writing completely.

More resources

All of the above suggestions I developed independently, although I am sure some (or many) of them are not original. You can find out more about dealing with content theft by searching on Google.