As a blogger myself, I know how incredibly frustrating it is when you see posts on other sites that were clearly copied from your blog. If these people gave appropriate credit (and a link) to your site, it would be one thing, but often times people will flat out steal your work and claim it as their own. Nothing gets me more steamed up than when I see someone ranked higher than me in the SERPs for MY ARTICLE!!!
A great little tool called Tracer may help writers get some credit for stolen work. Tracer is a free tool created by Tynt that helps to automatically protect your work. Tracer works by monitoring and recording any time someone highlights and copies text or images from your site. When this happens, Tracer will automatically add a link back to the original content when it is pasted.
Setting up Tracer on your site is very easy. Simple register your domain for a free account at Tynt and you will be given a piece of code to add to each page of your website. If you use any sort of content management system for your site, you can just add the code to your footer and you will be protected.
While it can’t stop others from stealing your work, at least you might get some benefit and credit out of it when they do! Visit the Tracer site for more information.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the blog post Justin – its great to hear your thoughts on Tracer! One qualifier for your audience; though Tracer is free right now while we are in the beta phase, coming soon is a paid service offering much richer analysis. That said, there will always be a free version that basically offers the same functionality you get from Tracer right now.
Cheers!
Kerri
Thanks for the update Kerri! I look forward to seeing what the paid service has to offer. The beta service looks very promising!
Man, the stuff you find! I’m going to take some more time to think about this one. Oddly enough, because of Google Alerts, I seem to always know when someone is copying me, or scraping me if you will, but most of the time I ignore it, and when I’m not ignoring it I’m leaving a comment making sure anyone else who visits knows I wrote the original, though that may not stay. Good stuff.
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