If there is one thing all website owners should be doing and that is creating more quality content. If you read other SEO blogs you would have read this there also, it’s not new news, in fact we have been saying it for years. Its quite simple, more quality relevant content should create more traffic to your website.
Content creation
Creating content which is worth reading takes time, if you love to write and have a lot of time then this isn’t an issue for you. But I would guess the majority of website owners don’t have as much time that is needed to create great content.
So when you do manage to find some valuable time and create your masterpiece the last thing you want is for someone else to copy it and put it on their own website without a credit to you.
Incidentally, if you can never find the time to write your important content you should see this!
Unique content
It is a well-known fact that duplicate content whether on the same website or over several domains is bad for your SEO campaign. Regular unique content can help your websites online reputation so it is very important to your online marketing campaign.
So how do you protect your content?
I’m going to show you a little tip which is easy to add to your website, you only need to do it once and it will make it a bit harder for people to copy your precious content.
Scanners – Robots not in disguise
But just before I get into what you need to do I think it would be good to quickly explain the two main ways content is copied.
The first are online robots, bits of code that go from one website to another mining for content to steal to be used elsewhere.
Copiers – Pesky humans!
The second are humans, those pesky earth walkers who sit at their desks surfing websites looking for content to borrow 🙂 . You will find that a large percentage of them are simply highlighting the text, hitting Copy and then Pasting it elsewhere, probably on their own site.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they gave you credit with one of those nice links to your website, but this doesn’t always happen.
How to stop people copying my content
So how can we stop this or even make it a little harder?
This little trick won’t stop everyone, but it will make it harder for those Human types and their Copy & Paste buttons!
Websites use a programming (kind of) language called HTML to help create what you see on your screen. The idea of this tip is to assign a little bit of code to one or more commands used by HTML.
One of the most common commands used and the one I will use in this example is the <DIV> command (you don’t need to use the <DIV> command it will work for other commands too).
I won’t go into detail about what this does but just think of it a command that groups up sections of a page (if you want to know the full job of a <DIV> command search HTML div in a search engine and you will get loads of info).
So for this example I will use this nice bit of valuable content and help protect it:
“Quality content on your website will help generate more traffic to your site, just let people know it’s there!”
In the simplified HTML version of the code it would look something like:
<div>Quality content on your website will help generate more traffic to your site, just let people know it’s there!</DIV>
Still following? Yep, good!
Another programming language used as well as HTML is CSS, this is used to handle the cosmetics of the page. Things like fonts used, colours and positioning of content on the page. We will be using CSS to help protect your content.
Now what we are going to do is to not allow anyone to highlight the text between <DIV> and </DIV>, after all if they can’t highlight the content they can’t Copy & Paste it either!
You could add our code below to every individual <DIV> you have on your website, but to be honest, you have better things to do!
So we will simply assign the code to ALL <DIV> commands using CSS. That way future content will also be protected too.
Code to use
So, as mentioned earlier, we will use CSS to assign some code which will protect all content between the <DIV> and </DIV> commands. You can add this either in your page header or in your seperate CSS file. We have provided both versions below:
Code in Header of webpage
Please don't forget to give me a credit link when copying, thanks!
Code in CSS file
Please don't forget to give me a credit link when copying, thanks!
Our Demo
Here at Juicy SEO we practise what we preach, so try and highlight the text on this page yourself and see it in action!
Don’t forget though…
As mentioned earlier, we all love links and if you wish to let people copy some of your content you will have to bare this in mind. We recommend including an Embed button so they can gather the info quickly and use if you want to share parts of a webpage.
Plus you would have a valuable link to your website in that embed as well!
Hint hint 🙂
We would love to hear from you on how this has helped your website and if you know of other little tips to help protect your content, give us a shout on one of our Social Media accounts!