Watch out! Content thieves about!

Writing text content for a website takes time and a lot of thought.

In fact, many people are completely overwhelmed by the thought of writing original text content and will employ others to do it for them. You can see why. Text content needs to be informative, relevant and succinct. It also has to be pitched just right to engage and interest your target audience, and of course the search engine robots that will crawl your website. As I said above, writing text for a website takes time and a lot of thought!

Sadly, there are unscrupulous lazy people out there who cannot be bothered to write their own text content. Instead they will find someone else’s website, copy the text content, and use it as their own. They really don’t care about the hard work that you put into that text, because the chances are you won’t know that they’ve copied it anyway. So what’s the problem? It’s no big deal copying someone else’s text is it?

Unfortunately it is. Copying someone else’s text, without their permission, is a violation of copyright and classed as theft. The person that you have copied text from can take legal action against you. They can also file a complaint with Google, who has the power to remove the offending web pages or website from their search results. Ultimately, having copied text content on your website could have a major negative impact on your Google rankings!

So how can you tell if someone has copied your website’s text content? The best way is to use a website such as Copyscape . There you can type in your domain name and Copyscape will display web pages that have the same content as your own. If you do find any websites that have copied your text information, it’s best to e-mail them. In your e-mail state what pages of their website are displaying your text content. Inform them that this is a copyright violation, and that if the text content is not removed you will escalate the copyright violation to Google. From our own experience, this is mostly enough to get the offending website to remove your content.

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