If it wasn’t all about content in the past, Google is certainly all about content now.  Websites with rich, informative types of content and readerships that keep coming back for more rank higher than “plain-jane” websites that blend in by offering something similar to everyone else.

Developing stellar content is challenging, but much of your ability to develop compelling content revolves around your knowledge of the subject matter.  If you’ve taken the time to create your own content, or if you’ve had someone else create unique content for you, the last thing you want is someone who takes it for themselves and presents it as their own.

If someone hasn’t stolen your content already, they will.

Strategies to Use to Protect Your Content

Even though anything goes on the internet, there are many actions you can take to protect your content. Here are a few to try:

• Do nothing!  Believe it or not, if someone steals your content and uses it on their own site, Google is actually remarkably adept at identifying the original author.  If the site that stole your content appears low-profile and like nobody reads it anyway, don’t worry too much about your content appearing there.
• Use Google Authorship.  First, you have to set up a profile with a pic at Google Plus.  Then, on any pages where you create the content, use this code:  <a rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/your-google-plus-unique-profile-ID/”>  When your content appears in the search engine results pages, your picture appears in the SERPs right alongside it like so:

If you don’t know how to insert the code into your website, you can download a plugin for most CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla that does it for you.  If you write the content for another site, you can still enter in the code anywhere on the page to make sure you get credit.

• Use Copyscape.  If you don’t monitor your content, you can use Copyscape to check to see if your website’s content appears anywhere else on the web.  Copyscape checks to see if the exact same characters appear somewhere else.  It can detect sections of copied content.  If someone copies your idea but uses different wording, however, Copyscape doesn’t do the job.
• Use the Tynt plugin.   Tynt is a totally free plugin for WordPress that monitors all of your site’s text and images.  It lets you know how many times your content has been copied and pasted by others.  Then, when they paste the content onto their own site, a back link to your original content is created.  Pretty cool, huh?

Those are the most effective ways to protect your content in 2013 – what do you think will happen in the future?