How to catch a content thief

I usually think about finding content thieves only after I’ve discovered a thief. I think to myself, “This can’t be the only one out there.” Usually, I’m right. Content thieves think they’re flying under the radar, but there are plenty of ways to catch them.

Google your keywords

I discover most thieves this way. I Google one of my targeted keyword terms to see where I’ve placed and there’s the thief, ranked right up there with me. I go after these people hard because they’re stealing the most traffic from me. Not only that, my site could lose credibility with readers because the content appears somewhere else. That’s personal speculation, but I’m not willing to take the risk.

Set up a Google Alert for incoming links

You can set up a Google Alert for any searchable term. When you write, include a backlink or two to your own site. Then, when the lazy thief reposts your content with links intact, Google will send you an alert letting you know that someone linked to you.

I’m not sure how Google runs this alert or up the search is updated, but this one doesn’t always work. For some of my sites there are far more links out there than I’ve been alerted to. Even so, I still use and recommend this as a way to catch thiefs.

Copyscape

Copyscape.com is probably one of the easiest ways to find copies of your webpages. There are some limitations to using it though. You must search by URL. If you have 100 different pages on your site, you’ll have to manually search all 100 of those pages. You are limited to a certain number of searches per domain each month. When you have several pages on your site, you can easily reach your free limit.

Copyscape has a premium version that lets you do more searches for a fee. You might check this out if you find that you’re consistently hitting your free search limit each month.

Google your content

The old-fashioned way of catching thieves involves Googling random phrases from an article to see if any results are returned. The key is to pick a sentence or phrase that’s not likely to appear on other pages unless they’ve been stolen from you.

Going after thieves can be a full-time job especially when you have a large site and lots of traffic and revenue to consider. Still, it’s worth it to keep your content yours.

What do you do to catch content thieves? How often do you find your work has been stolen?