Transcription
So here’s a scenario for you, let’s say you’re using a conversion rate optimization tool to make sure that your site is performing well, only to discover when you watch some of the screen recordings that people are actually scraping the contents of your blog posts, presumably to reuse them and plagiarize them on the Internet. What do you do? Well, this is a real life scenario that one of my clients found themselves in. And here is the advice that I gave to them.
Hey, Dave, I’m just wondering if you can help me with this. We have a lot of people we found out through clarity as stealing our content and this has been happening. This happens like I check it and it’s happened before. And they just come in like this. This just got published. This is like last week’s content that is stealing all the content, which is really annoying. And what’s great about clarity is I know I can see from the ATM that they are there on our mailing list.
Do you know if there’s any way that I’m able to block them or I mean, obviously I can’t block them from the site, but I can unsubscribe them. Yeah, I guess we could look at the narrowed down by looking at the people who have that we emailed on that day of the UTM because thankfully we put the date in the U.S. and which is helpful and then see the clicks. But yeah, they’ve just on the whole article, even everything.
I don’t know if this is anything you can help us with. I know you said there was not many, you know, tools that could help with this. The one that we were going to implement didn’t really work. Can you tell me more about why it doesn’t work and if there is anything that we can do? Because I just don’t really like people stealing your stuff if we can avoid it. Original content. Anyway, let me know what you think.
Appreciate it.
All right. So the question today is I’ve got a blog post up. It’s from a client. And they have noticed through Microsoft clarity screen recordings that people are going in and they’re selecting all of the text and copying it. And so the concern is obviously, you know, they spent a lot of time, money and effort to try to build a readership. They don’t want their content stolen, plagiarized and used someplace else on the Internet. So what can they do to prevent the content from being copied?
And so I’m going to attempt to answer that here the best that I can. Now, I would say don’t do anything that is going to infringe upon your regular users experience on their website. So there are tools. And I think the natural inclination to a lot of content owners is, well, I need to block copying. I need to prevent that from happening. There are tools that will block right clicking. I’m sure we’ve all been on a website before where we couldn’t right.
Click. But the problem is, if you had a thousand visitors to your website, 999 of them are not there for any malicious reason. They’re just there to consume the content. So we don’t want to make their experience worse just to stop the one bad actor out of a thousand. So you know what? Why would that stop their experience? Well, let’s say I wanted to look up a word like maybe I wasn’t sure what this word meant.
I can double click on it and then I can look it up. Right. And I’ll show me the definition. Or maybe I just wanted to copy. You know, I felt like this line was really meaningful to me, so I wanted to copy it and maybe I’ll send it to my friend who’s going through something similar. This is about relationship. So, you know, maybe that makes a lot of sense. And now if I turn that off, I’m making my website less useful.
It’s not functioning in a way that normal websites function. And that is a you know, if we’re talking about conversion rates and marketing, just making people feel like the website is the usual thing that they expect is a big psychological advantage in getting them to trust you. So if everything feels locked down, people will just not feel as comfortable being inside of your website. Think about, you know, if you if you’re in a home and everything’s like, you know, you have to open locks to get into doors, it would just feel weird, like, why is this place so unsafe?
You wouldn’t probably want to stay there too long. Same goes for a website. OK, so that aside, what can we actually do to make our websites secure from thieves? Well, unfortunately, we kind of have to take a reactionary role here because there’s nothing illegal about just copying and pasting some text. I mean, maybe they’re just saving it for themselves. Probably not, but maybe they are. They go through article after article, copying and pasting.
You have to you know, there’s not a real logical reason for that. But we can’t do anything about someone just copying and pasting. We can’t block an individual person from our website because obviously their IP address will change. They could use a VPN. There’s all sorts of ways around it. And by the way, then another reason the right clicking doesn’t work is that I can simply right click view the page source. And even if I’m showing a website that is blocking all the content, I have access to all of the text.
Now, as I scroll through the page here, eventually I will get to the article and I could simply just copy and paste it right from here we go. Here is the article. I could simply just copy and paste it with the HTML markup in it and it’s very easy to strip that out. So you have the plain text again that said, what can we actually do? As I was saying, it needs to be a little bit reactionary, unfortunately.
So what I recommend is a tool called Copyscape. So what Copyscape will do in this part I want to show you right now is completely free. You can take your you copy this and I’ll paste it into Copyscape and it will go out and will check to see if anyone is plagiarizing. The content on your website. So this one says no results are found. So if someone just sold this article, they haven’t gotten around to posting it and it’s not ranking anywhere on the Internet yet.
So the good news is that it’s not ranking, but you still would need to check this regularly. And if you have you know, you post five blog posts a week over the course of a year, that’s going to be 250 posts. You want to be checking every single one every day. So, of course, Copyscape offers a monitor service. Five dollars a month is the starting cost for up to 10 pages. And you can add additional pages for a quarter per month.
So it’s probably just something that is worthwhile to build into your budget as you start to become a more and more popular blogger just to think, OK, it’s going to cost me an extra quarter a month per article that we post. And they do have this this professional service, which just checks daily. That’s the difference here between the twenty dollars a month service and the five dollar month service is at the premium. One does daily checks and it’s a little bit more expensive for every single post because of that.
So this is weekly up here. I think that’s going to be fine. For most bloggers, it’s pretty regular. And then what happens? Let’s say you you run through Copyscape and you find out that, yes, someone is in fact, they copied my entire blog post. What do you do at that point? Well, before we get into that, I will mention that you can also run it through grammar. Grammar has a free option for for plagiarism.
This is primarily meant to see if, like, something you wrote, let’s say you hired a writer to write a blog post to see if if that was plagiarized, if you’re paying for someone to plagiarize another post. But you can also just copy your actual text and will check over 1716 billion Web pages to be certain that it’s not already out there on the Web. So you can kind of use it in reverse as well. I don’t like it as much as Copyscape because Copyscape will just let you put in the URL.
It’s a lot easier to do that. And there’s no animation for grammar. You can’t pay a fee and have them check your website each month. So that’s another option. All right. So let’s say we do find some plagiarism. What do we do about it? Well, first thing you don’t want to do is find out where the site is hosted. So you go ahead and put a Eurail into this website hosting checker dot com. There’s a lot of simple you know, you can just Google who hosts this site and you’re going to find a lot of different tools like like this.
Let’s see, hosting checker who whoopsies, dotcom hosting advice. So there’s a lot of them. I’m using the one called hosting. Check it out. Come right now. You can simply put in a Eurail here, like I’ll do, you know, Facebook dot com and see that Facebook is hosted by Facebook. But you can put any website in here and find out who their host is. When you find out who the host is, then you’re going to contact them and tell them that, hey, the content on this website is plagiarized and it needs to be taken down.
Now, most of the time, if they’re on a larger host, you know, like a well-known hosting provider, they will take that matter seriously and make sure that that page gets pulled down or they will eventually cancel their their hosting account. But sometimes you need to be a little bit more firm, especially, you know, let’s say it’s a case where they’re hosting themselves or maybe it’s in another country that doesn’t really care about our laws. Then you’re going to have to go one step further and this is going to cost you some more money.
This is the DMCA dotcom creator takedown page, right. So we can enter in the infringing content where it was copied from descriptions here. Enter your name and information and then it does cost some money to get this taken care of so you can do a free quote. That’s the cheapest is they’ll just like let you know what what you expect. Or you can pay for a service to give you at the toolkit and to be able to take things down.
So that’s ten dollars a month, one hundred dollars a year, and you’ll get unlimited subscriptions here. Or you can do a one hundred ninety nine dollars per site fee and they will do it for you at that point. So you kind of have to gauge whether it’s actually impacting your bottom line. Now, Google is very smart, so Google knows when the original content was posted and they will actually they will know that this is duplicate content from someone else.
You posted it. So it’s not always something to you that you need to go and find every single piece of content and make sure there’s a takedown notice for every single piece of content, because most of the time that content is not going to rank because Google is going to be smart enough to know that your content was original and this other content is duplicate and it’s usually garbage and it won’t serve that to anybody. But if you do notice that, hey, in another kind of step you could take in between here is you start monitoring the the let’s say you come back with some results on Copyscape, start monitoring those pages to see how they’re ranking.
And if they’re actually ranking for the keywords you want to rank for, then it’s time. You step in and actually spend a little bit of money to do a DMCA takedown notice, so not the most simple solution, it’s not a simple plug in you can put on your website that prevents people from stealing from you. But in most cases, you know, you’re probably not going to run into this extremely frequently. So in the case that it does become a problem, this is the procedure that you can follow to make sure that your content is safe and your investment in your website is sound.
All right. Hopefully that was helpful. And I’ll see you in the next video.
