Copyright to prevent copy wrongs in B2B content marketing
You've worked hard researching, writing and editing your content for your B2B website. Publishing unique and compelling content attracts visitors and differentiates you from your competititors. Your site is realizing more visitors and leads for your efforts.
Then, while viewing your search engine results pages or your saved Twitter search, you notice another site in has "borrowed" your content and branded it as theirs without giving any attribution, credit or link back to your original site.
You've been scraped!
To add insult to injury, some online content authors have discovered some scraper sites outrank their original content since Google’s Panda update. According to SEOEngine "Panda is a filter that Google has designed to spot what it believes are low-quality pages. Have too many low-quality pages, and Panda effectively flags your entire site." Recently, the update has Pandafied original content authors' sites instead of the absconders' low-quality sites.
It's a hard pill to swallow when you lose your hard-fought traffic ranking to someone copying your copy.
A solution: Copyright your content.
After registering all of his site's content with the US Copyright Office, Houston Neal of Software Advice wrote a blog detailing the a process. Read the post How to Beat Content Scrapers – And Avoid Google Panda Penalties – With Copyright Protection on their blog.
Have you ever seen your content on another site without your permission? What did you do?
/mh
Martine Hunter is the creative director of inbound marketing with the Atlanta advertising agency, MLT Creative, which specializes in B2B marketing. She holds the Inbound Marketing professional certification and serves the Atlanta chapter of the Business Marketing Association as a member of the board of directors.
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