Protecting the content from being copied by some of those copy bloggers are the most difficult part to handle. It is a pain to see that our blog content and images are being copied and posted as their own even without a single mentioning or proper credits.
We create the original content, spend a lot of time to edit it, to take photographs and combine them into a post and publish it. But within few minutes, a copy blogger visits our blog and copy the entire post or images and re-publish as their own. Even I have found most of these copy bloggers crop the images and even watermark the images as their own! How pity!
So far I have experienced lot of such cases and most of them are new Sri Lankan blog owners. My blog is mainly about Sri Lankan recipes and I guess this blog is a great resource for most of Sri Lankan food tried and tasted at our home 🙂
Below is a screen shot to show how many sites have copied the image of Milk Rice (kiri bath).
I don’t think we can stop these things completely. However we can try some methods and prevent a bit.
How to prevent the content from being copied
Disable the right click
To protect the images, we can always disable the right click function. So nobody can save it. But, I don’t practice this. Because,
– I want my content to be featured at other sites and linky parties. Of course those who host these parties give proper credit and it is nice to be featured on those great sites.
-I don’t want to prevent loyal readers of Food Corner from saving an image of a recipe for later reference.
So, this method is doubtful. I want to know your idea about this method. Are you going to disable the right click?
Watermark the images
It is very important to watermark the images; at least we show that we are the copyright holder for that image. By watermarking the images, we can avoid stealing images for up to certain level. There are photo editing software like PicMonkey ,PhotoScape or Photoshop which is helpful for watermarking the images.
However, those who copy the images try to crop and edit the images. Even there are methods to remove the watermark. But still, this method works.
Manage the RSS feed
I have a really bad experience. Around end of last year, I found a new blog which has copied my entire blog including images and content. That time I have already posted a total of around 300+ posts. How pain to see my entire blog is posted in another site without my permission! I tried to contact the admin of that blog, but he didn’t respond. If you just search for a blog with the name ‘Faster than instant noodles’, you’ll see what has happened to that blog now. If you check his G+ profile, you’ll see some of my posts urls and images are still there(with his blog post url). However when he didn’t respond to my comments, I filed removal requests from Google. This is not easy as we need to file a complaint for each url. However it worked as I continued filing daily and after sometime and after few requests, I could see the entire blog posts were removed.
Anyway, that’s my story. With this incident I searched a lot about how to prevent such cases.
I found from another blogger that, it is not good to allow full RSS feed in your blog feeds. This may disturb those loyal readers who like to read a blog post as a feed. But, I changed the settings in my posts to display until the jump break.
At the time, when I was struggling to remove the content from the previous mentioned blog; I noticed that my new posts were appeared in his blog until the jump break leaving a link to my site. At least I could make my mind!
Display copyright notices and get the help of a third party
Get the help of services like Copyscape.com or DMCA.com
They offer both free version and a paid version. Display their badges in your posts/site and remind the readers to stay away from copying.
Set up Google authorship for your content.
By setting up Google Authorship, the content is linked to you first once published. Later, this will help to remove the issues on duplicate content .Check here on how to get Google Authorship.
Above listed are some tips on how to prevent the content from being stolen. Wait for the other parts of this post on how to find copied content and how to react when you found copied contents. I will post them soon.
Now it is your turn. I know most of you have experience and thoughts about these issues. Please share your ideas and tips in comments. That will help all other bloggers to improve their blogs. 
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22 comments
About copying images..even if you disable the right click, the image can be saved using a different method. PRINTSCREEN!
By pressing the printscreen button and saving the image on the hard disk, one can crop the image of the recipe. No one can make out the difference, whether it is the original pic downloaded or printcreen captured and cropped.
thanks Manju for your valuable input….didn’t know that before
Great post.. Very helpful… Thanks for sharing Amila 🙂
Informative post dear…..we take a lot of pain,including time for preparing a food item, photograph it, work on photographs… and then to write the blog post. It sounds really bad that someone just copy it without giving the due credits 🙁 I feel that copyright and authorship are good options…..Thanx for sharing 🙂
An informative post dear….It sounds really bad that someone copies your blog content…. How much time and effort we spend for cook, photograph and the work done on photographs, for the write up….? I feel copyright and authorship are good options…..Thanx for sharing 🙂
Just like manju said you can prevent photos from copies. But you can put a DMCA that way it is really good. Nice article.
Useful Info for a beginners like me…….Thanks……
x❤x❤
useful post thank you for sharing
When someone captures a printscreen and uses it, Copyscape and DMCA cannot detect them. Its a new picture altogether. It doesn’t have any attributes identifiable with the original picture. So, a warning on the blog against copying the content does little good. Cheaters gonna cheat… 🙂 That’s the bitter truth. Unless you actually happen visit their site and see the printscreen pic of your original pic by a co-incidence, you will never know printcreen copies of your pics exist over the internet.
Very informative and useful post.
I should try google authorship, I hate people just copy and paste or without mentioning or link, thanks for sharing !
Nice informative post Amy! I need to get on these things. Thanks for sharing!
Wow Amila, that’s awful!! The nerve! So glad you were able to rectify the problem, better yet, glad you were able to catch him red-handed! Thanks for the great tips and thanks for linking up! Have a wonderful weekend!
Hi Amila, great posting. Whatever that is posted online it’s not 100% safe. What you mentioned above it does help to minimizes and make it harder for people to copy and steal our content. But any how there is no way we can protect our content and pictures 100% safe.
Have a nice weekend.
Thanks for stopping by today. And oh you are so right about the copyright, it can be so incredibly annoying, when your hard work is getting stolen……
Watermark usually helps though. 🙂
Xo,
Luchessa.org
you can disable right click but add the pin it hover button to images…this way your real readers can pin and nobody else can copy your work.
thanks Divya for your input.I didnt know that,want to check how to do it…
Sorry about your troubles. The bad news is that your work is copied, but I guess the good news is that somebody thinks it’s worth copying 🙂 . There will always be those who misuse the internet but most of us are nice people.
yes,thats true,every bad thing has a positive effect too….
thanks for commenting…
Very useful post dear, shared very important points for many people…
I have a request from you, can u share with us how to have recipe index with images thanks in advance…
thanks Priya,I will post
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Jennifer @ The Jenny Evolution
http://www.thejennyevolution.com
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