More and more, marketers are hearing that content is king. And guess what? It’s true. Publishing unique and engaging content on your site will not only attract visitors to your site, but also set you apart from your competition. Some sites, however, like to borrow content from other sites, brand it as their own, and basically take all the credit.
Google’s recent Panda update aimed to put the “smack-down” on these scraper sites. At Software Advice, we noticed many of the scraper or spam sites disappear from the SERPs within a few days. We were very pleased with the initial results. But then things started to look a little fishy. We noticed that in some cases, websites that stole and illegally published content were ranking higher than the sites – like ours – that originally published the content.
The logical solution would be to contact the scraper site and force them to remove your content. By law, they are not allowed to reproduce content that does not belong to them. However, unless you have actually registered your content with the U.S. Copyright office, you have little leverage against the scrapers. In other words, you can cry foul all you want, but unless your material is copyrighted, you are S.O.L.
After receiving this bit of sage advice from our lawyer, we decided to take action. Software Advice registered all 1,200 of its pages with the Copyright office. This was no small task, and before beginning the process, we had little idea of what to expect. So, we thought we would share our experience with you to offer a little guidance. Go to our blog and read more about the importance of copyrighting your online content, as well as a step-by-step process of how to go about it.
