Being a blogger and content creator we continuously try to create new content and publish them on our website. Every blogger who crafts content himself for his site puts a lot of effort along with time for a proper output that is going to suit the website.
However, there is a sad truth of getting your content theft by other people in a fraction of second with just two or three simple mouse clicks. It doesn't matter whether you are a blogger, or a graphics designer or a photographer, nowadays you can't just bring your visual or textual content online without some authority proof on it.
Again thinking from the perspective of people who just "right-click and save" your content, they are just using it because they liked it somehow. They may not have the creativity or idea how to craft that or probably they took it for some further modifications. Anyhow, content theft is illegal and should take your action quickly.
In such a case, what we can do better is protect content on website so that people can not copy, download or use your content without your permission. They either have to personally ask for the content or they can use them under your authority.
A lot of effort can go into the content creation process and fortunately there are various ways to protect content on website. I write about WordPress so I will make a slight difference in the topic by including "WordPress" as "How to protect content on WordPress website?". I'm assuming you already know about some good tools but these are few tools I believe you should give a try while taking care of your site performance.
** Honestly, I do not want to put some extra load on the site and break some javascript unintentionally. So the lighter is the plugin or code you are going to use the better it is.
How To Protect Content On WebSite?
Many people are continuously coping with your articles, posts and keep on publishing by themselves without giving you the credit. According to the "fair use" rule of copyright law, an author may use limited works of another author, that include the headlines/excerpts but not the full article.
If an author copies the full article (without permission) then the matter of content theft arises. So you can use these plugin to protect your textual contents.
#1. WP Content Copy Protection
Taking action before somebody copy your content is always a better option. There are a couple of website copy protection plugins in the repository but this plugin is much batter than the others.
This plugin is light and does not put any load on your site when installed. The workfunction of this plugin is really simple but effective. What it does is disable right-click, image drag/drop/save, source code viewing, and keyboard shortcuts for copy and cut.
The plugin says text selection is disabled when activated but that doesn't work with me. Although the plugin is updated which is good in terms of security purposes. You can install the plugin and it will start working immediately after activation.
#2. Apply Delay RSS Feeds
This is really a unique idea. I don't know whether you thought about this before or not but it helps. Delaying RSS feed actually used so that even after publishing your article the RSS feed will wait for the configured time to fetch your page and ping on search engines.
In this little time gap, you can recheck your published page for any possible mistakes and fix them is any. But here is the key. As soon as you publish the robot get your page and index it before you apply on Google, Bing for indexing. They can also grab the content without your privileging your authority.
So, delaying RSS feed will save you from such a creepy thing that we don't even think about. This plugin will let you choose the time fraction when the post can be reached by RSS. Delay RSS Feeds plugin is updated and tested with the current version of WordPress.
#3. Use Plagiarism Checker
You already know about plagiarism checkers they can help you find whether your article is copied? However, checking each article is very time consuming and I don't believe every plagiarism tool can go deep as Google or Bing to find out copied content.
You need to pick tools that are used globally and have access to the users. Telling so because of the plagiarism checker tool of Grammarly works nicely and reliable as well. But you will need to purchase the premium version of it.
Like Grammarly, there is another more popular tool called "Copyscape", and the reason is it can check your entire domain to find out if any of your content is theft. It also provides some banners which say "protected by Copyscape" and pop with "do not copy content from this site" while hovering on it. Just for warning the people, it doesn't really protect content on website 😛
The developers of Copyscape have provided another tool called "Siteliner" which is more of a site testing tool that also provides results for duplicate, common and unique contents.
#4. Use Clone Maker Plugin
Life will be easier if there is a tool which will automatically detect copied content from your site and inform you in one dashboard. This plugin doesn't really search the whole site and let you know which content has been taken from you, instead, it detects when an article is copied by the user and informs you about it.
The insights it gives are really useful and can help you take quick action against it. However, there is a cool feature that the plugin provides as it adds "read more" hiddenly while the content is being copied. You will see the option to add custom text where you can place anything you want.
This can be done inside the theme file with coding but I recommend not to do it if you are not a professional.
Clone Maker plugin is not up to date. Use this plugin at your own risk. I have tested it but did not encounter any problem with the website.
#5. Use Yoast To Insert Author Attribute
Usually, there is nothing an SEO plugin has to do when it comes to protecting content theft. Though, Yoast has something special to do with RSS to protect content on website.
Normally, coping and publishing your whole post into another site is possible with the auto-posting software. These software grab articles with the help of RSS feed. While they publish it the author credit is left out.
Sadly, auto-publishing tools are not going to help anyone to achieve rank and generate traffic to a website. So these tools should not be used to copy and paste contents from another website.
Yoast has an option that lets you add custom content both at the start and end of your RSS feed. You can add author info or any other lines according to you. Since the webmasters who use these kinds of tools do not check the contents hence your custom content has more chances to appear with the article on their site.
This is how Yoast can help you protect content on website (articles) as well as authority.
How To Protect Image Content On Your Website?
If there are chances of stealing your content then stealing images are another serious issue. If someone uses images on their site from another source then he has to give credit. There are many sources from where a bunch of royalty-free images is available to download.
However, your creations are not royalty-free, if I am not guessing it wrong... somebody can't just download your image and then later publish it within their content and get some real claps or upvotes.
So you should think about protecting your images as well. These are the few steps I believe will help you to disallow people from downloading your images easily.
#1. Disable Right Click On Images
The way to download an image is very popular. Within 2-3 seconds with two clicks on the mouse, anyone can save an image into their computer. "Right click + save/save as", too easy.
You can do a trick, disable the right-click on images, it would be better if you disable on the whole website. I don't think a blogging site normally needs a right-click action. There are various plugins to do so, you can install any one of them but as mentioned earlier you should use the wp-content protection plugin because it disables right-click on both image and text.
Another good plugin is the "No right-click" plugin. This plugin will provide security keys to protect your images as well as the content. It has many built-in features such as no right-click + disable Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+A.
#2. You Can Use Galleries
Galleries are attractive to showcase your article images in one place with sliding/flipping controls. Some websites use galleries with dynamic textual contents, which means when you are sliding the images the relevant piece of textual content will also appear under the images.
Again, sometimes it sounds laborious work to upload images one by one on the website. With the gallery, you will be able to upload multiple images at the same time with the help of extended customizing tools. (If you ever experienced image scaling issues on your site take help from this guide)
There are many plugins available for creating galleries. The NextGen plugin is an effective plugin for creating a gallery as it offers many extra options such as slideshow, lightbox, uploading zip files, etc. Gallery will protect your images as readers can't download the images which is why I added it in this list of how to protect content on website!
You can also use Photo gallery by 10Web which offers multiple views options and robust lightbox. You can even add the galleries to your site widgets.
#3. Use Hotlink Protections
The use case of Hotlink protection is kind of different. When an auto publisher tool or someone publishes your content on their site just by copy and pasting than the images are served from your server. That means you are losing images along with server resources for other websites.
To prevent such use of images you can enable hotlink protection from your WebHost panel. So far it's one of the good ways to protect content on website.
Enabling hotlink protection has some drawbacks as well. You might experience blank images while sharing your content social networks such as twitter, facebook, etc.
#4. Use Water Mark On Images
Using a watermark is another option to stop image theft activities. Adding a watermark in the image left a credit sigh and whenever someone uses their readers will see the authority signature and understand who is the actual creator of the image. So, basically, you can save your images from being theft.
I prefer to add a low transparent watermark near mid-portion of the image which is kind of a strict way. But if you want better image representation you should at least add watermark on any of the corners.
Envira Gallery also allows you to add watermark on the images but you should install a separate add-on for the plugin.
#5. Add DCMA Protection (Badge) On Your Site
This step is more convenient rather than any other way to protect content on website. DMCA has both paid and free protection, you can choose any. If DMCA finds any person who is using your images or content then they will notify them not to do this offense otherwise strict action will be taken.
This process is automatic so you just have to install the DMCA badge on your dashboard. DCMA will automatically insert the badges regardless of it's free or paid. When you will sign up you will get the benefit of certified badges.
#6. Include Copyright Notice
Adding copyright notice will scare people to use your content or images. It will notify them that if they will use the images then serious steps will be taken against theft activities.
You just have added copyright notice in the footer by adding the HTML code in the text. However, you need to update it yearly. This won’t help much but it will inform people not to use any images or content. So, ultimately you can decrease the image theft activities and protect content on website as well.
Final Words:
If you are investing your time and energy to create something it's important to earn the credit of it even if someone is using your content. In this digital world, you should take necessary steps to protect content on website otherwise somebody else is going to use your stuff and achieve something that you have not yet.
These tools (listed above), I believe, will help you to keep your website contents safe from others. If you have any questions/suggestions regarding this article please mention it below.
Cheers...
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