Tools to Secure Your Content from Scrapers and Stealers

There are a number of tools out there to help protect your website and its content from:

• Screen Scrapers who are grabbing your content and using it on their website.
• Unauthorized use of your text or photos.
• Competitors who are stealing your content and using it on their websites.

Copyscape will search for copies of your pages on the web. It is for plagiarism checking and searching for duplicate content.  You can just do some on-the-fly searching by putting in your website URLs.  Or, you can sign up for their CopySentry program which for about $.25 cents per page and it will do a weekly search of the internet and notify you of new instances of your copy being stolen.

Photos are a harder nut to crack.

Tineye is a tool that will help you find images on the internet that are the same as or very similar to yours. It is far from perfect though.

Watermarking your images is a great way to start protecting them.  You can put little visible versions of your logo or URL in the corner of your images using Photoshop or a special watermarking specific software package.

For a more powerful watermarking effort, employ a service that puts secret hidden digital watermarks on your images and then searches the web for anyone stealing your photos. Digimarc is a popular provider of this service.

DMCA is a newer one that might be worth checking out too, it claims to do both photos watermarking & searching, copywriting search & alert AND they can help you send the cease and desist “Takedown” request.