Web Pages and YOUR Content

As your site becomes more as a viewed sight on the search engines, there is more opportunity to have content stolen from your site and placed onto one's own.

Interesting Points regarding Stolen Content:

When someone uses content which is already on a web site, the user who takes the content and places it on their own site will be penalized by the search engines for duplicate content issues. Most of the time, the pages will be placed in the supplemental index of Google (Back up results pages with duplicate content). Supplemental pages will never out rank unique pages of content.

Realistic Facts of Theft of your Content and Materials:

Taking copyrighted materials, altering those materials to have them look similar to one's own is theft. When competing with the original owner of the materials this is can be prosecuted.

You can use different methods to protect your web site from Web Theft.
Below are some different ideas to help you protect yourself.

According to the US Copyright office, web pages are viewed up as similar to software programs. Since they are "programmed" you would simply need a valid copyright symbol. The symbol © with year and author name would be sufficient.

Taking Copyrighting a step further

You may also register a web site and filing it under the copyright office. It may cost around $40.00 with the HTML code and form to be sent to US Copyright office.

Trademark your Materials

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that it is trademark infringement to use a competitor's trademark in a web page META tag. The court noted that such terms could be used without violating trademarks if used as root words expressed as lower case."

As trademarks are concerned, now with Pay Per Click Marketing and Search Engine Optimization trademarks are a sensitive matter. It is becoming more difficult to market brand names due to trademarks. Although if are marketing trademark names be sure to view the guidelines stated by the company.

Tools for Copyright Problems

When being asked to work on web sites, much of the time the content is simply not original because of previous web development. We use select tools that help you identify if your content has been copied and how you can prevent others from taking you content.

Quote Finder - This tool will allow you to enter in content to be analyzed to identify if it has quotes from other pages within the internet. A great tool to identify if web sites which we are called to optimize have been copied and content is hindering the ranking results.

CopyScape - This tools will search for copies of your web pages that you developed. If you think someone is taking your materials then this tools will identify them.