Content generation is one of your biggest investment in terms of time and efforts. Content is king so to speak so you must make every effort to update your site with regular fresh quality postings.  Unfortunately the Internet technology also makes it more easier for people to steal information.

Here’s three simple tips to deal with plagiarism or digital content theft.  The first method involves filing a report o the admin of the host service provider where the sites are hosted. The second approach involves some tweaking to your RSS feeds.

 File A Report To WordPress.com or Blogger.com
Autoblogs are the biggest culprits as far as content duplication is concern.  Most autoblogging systems pulls RSS feeds and re-post the content as it is sans the author resource box (link to the originator of the information).  Many autoblogs are hosted on bloggerspot or the wordpress free service.

You can file a report or notify the admin or the PR of these services against the perpetrators.   Blogger is known to take actions against such weblogs.  I use to maintain a blogger blog with the same name ‘myhomebiznet.blogspot.com’.

All of a sudden Blogger shut down that blog because someone complain that it is spamming.  I was pretty sure I did not spam but anyway the bottom line is that if someone file a report against you in blogger.com you are done for…

Use Excerpts For The Feeds
Instead of posting the entire content to the feed, you can configure the feed to output  just excerpt of it. This will prevent autoblogging system from stealing your entire  content.  Furthermore, this method has the benefit of  increasing traffic juice to your site because the reader has to visit your site to read the rest of the post content.

Defer Feed Updates
I learned the hard way about this important factor.  Most of the WordPress blog feed is configured to auto update as soon as a  new article is posted online.  It can also be configured to auto ping RSS directories whenever new content is published.

You should delay the feed update for at least a day or two after your post is published online. This is done to ensure your article is index by the search engine first during the search engine page ranking process. You want to Google to identify you site as the originator of the post article. This is done in the first come first serve basis.

If your feed is updated without any delay, there is high chance that some autoblogs that pull  your feed content might end up being index by Google ahead of yours. As a result, mighty big-G might wrongly  sense or assume that your site is stealing content instead!

So that’s it, three simple tips to deal with copyright infringement and plagiarism.  These methods are not foolproof  but it might help in one way or another to make it more difficult for autoblogs and the likes to steal your valuable content.  Do check out my previous article on how to combat digital content theft