So you’ve slaved for hours creating valuable content on your affiliate website because you know that it’s needed to increase search engine rankings, improve customer retention and just plain help you market your product to potential buyers. Then one day you check your logs and notice some funny referrals…you hit the referral site and what do you see? You see all your hard work, working for someone else.

This is the part where you just want to throw something out a window or call the authorities. Unfortunately copyright law for content online is fickle and you will have a hard time even getting someone to investigate the crime. This is very disappointing because you will probably lose all your hard work and have to start over to avoid duplicate content issues in the search engines.

Content thieves are a part of this business and they are not going anywhere. While you can’t stop them, you can slow them down by adhering to a few simple rules.

Use links to other sites you own on the page and in the content. Most thieves don’t do their homework and won’t remove some of them. The deeper in the content you can bury a link, the less likely it will be removed. You can at least track back from referral logs.

If you are using examples in your content, talk about your site. Thieves are far less likely to take the page if it is about the site.

Have a copyright notice visible and bury it multiple times in your html comments.

Keep all your graphics in one directory, then periodically (quarterly) move the directory and all url’s pointing to it. Then watch for 404’s to that directory. Often, a good 404 redirect system will log referrals and then you can track back to the page.

Keep your raw server logs as disk space is cheap these days. At some point, you may need them.
Break up your content into smaller pages.

Break your normal linking method by occasionally throwing in some relative or absolute links to the rest of your site.

If this is your livelihood, take an hour and go have a chat with a local lawyer. It may cost you a small amount, but you never know when a carefully worded fax or letter on legal stationary will come in handy. It also helps to have a working relationship with legal counsel familiar with your business model.

Watch those referral logs, they will tell you who is linking to you and from where. Also surf through the engines when you have time, it can often help snag a page stealer.

Continue to produce fresh content – an active website is less likely to feel the sting of a thief and it will also help you recover quickly after an incident.

Check all domains that are close to your domain name’s spelling, sound or are common misspellings.
By using these simple tactics, you can help prevent your website from becoming the next causality in the war to capture and steal traffic.

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