The other day I blogged about tynt.com’s tracer program and how to stop it from annoying you while browsing. The idea behind it makes sense to a lot of web publishers. You don’t want people ripping off your content. But the post the other day pointed out how easy it is to get around these measures.
Google has a feature called Google Alerts, http://www.google.com/alerts, which lets you find content and emails it to you. I strongly recommend that you set up alerts for your domain name, and company name at a minimum, and get them emailed to you as they happen. This lets you keep on top of what people are saying about your company.
It would be trivial to include a fairly unique phrase into pages you are wanting to try to protect. Then setup an alert for that phrase and have Google email you. Sure you may get some false positives, but provided the phrase is unique enough, it should be few and far between. Remember to use double quotes, like “this is my phrase” so that google doesn’t match “this website is not the same as my website, even though it has the same words as my phrase“. See how all the words are there, but it’s not the phrase. And it could miss a copied page if they did enough editing on the copied content. But since these people are basically lazy, they won’t edit the page much if at all. So it should catch the majority of them. Catching the others probably won’t happen with the other “solutions” either if they’re modifying the content that much.
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About: Robert: Robert Porter holds MCSE, A+, Net+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founder of Lagniappe Internet L.L.C., a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration. |
