I've covered the issue of "how to protect the ownership of your content" in a recent article series I wrote for SiteProNews, and it has brought in a considerable amount of feedback. I'm not being critical when I say this, but many people fail to see the importance of content ownership, and it's costing those people money. For some, the article series was a 'eureka' moment, they clamored for more information and set about implementing the content ownership strategies I shared. For others, it was mostly a case of not understanding the issues of content theft, or not realizing how it was directly affecting their own web traffic.

First off, if you need to catch up with some back-reading on this subject then start here, Google and Article Marketing Hypothesis. This was my first step into the content ownership subject and it came about after spending a lot of time in 2011 testing various strategies.

To recap the issue, the web is rife with content theft, both from automated content scrapers and from people who randomly steel and republish your content. It's hard to say which of the culprits is worse, clearly the automated bots have the power to do damage at a much higher rate. The scenario is that you publish content on your website, it gets 'stolen', 'scraped' or 'harvested' (call it what you will) and then the content is either posted verbatim, posted verbatim with all links removed, or automatically spun into some variation of the original, in an attempt to make it unique.

I've published two articles in the series and in the second article I gave a simple strategy to place a barrier between your content and these thieves. It isn't a fool-proof barrier by any means but it is far better than doing nothing at all. You can read the full article here

Some people were confused about what I was saying, believing that the steps needed to protect content ownership were necessary for all content on your website. Clearly that isn't the case. if you have certain landing pages which receive a good deal of traffic, then it's worth the effort to implement my content ownership strategy on those pages. Other pages (like this one) may not require the type of 'security' which I refer to in my articles.

If you have questions, just drop me a line via the contact form above, and be sure to drop your email in the subscription form at the top of this page so I can send you useful information on web marketing, article marketing and protecting your content from thieves.