How to Protect Your Content From Being Copied

Images, texts, and videos have always been and will be copied. No website owner can prevent content theft. 

Although you can protect content by relying on luck and confronting plagiarists after your content gets stolen, there is another option. Thankfully, original content is protected by default. And if you decide to confront plagiarists, you will have to deal with the aftermath of stolen content anyway.

In this blog post, you will find out what content plagiarism is, how to spot it, and useful tips for protecting your texts, images, and videos from plagiarism. Let’s dive in.

What is content plagiarism?

Content plagiarism happens when someone uses or repurposes your online materials without your permission. This includes copying your articles, using your pictures or videos, taking your music, or even copying your website design. Plagiarists might steal content by copying it word for word, paraphrasing, or translating it to another language. Some even use content scraping tools to automatically grab content from other websites.

How do you find out if your online content was stolen?

If you suspect that your content has been copied, there are several ways to check:

Using a search engine

Enter the title of your article in the search bar and look through the results to see if they contain similar texts. 

Example: If your article is titled “10 Best SEO Practices for 2024”, type this exact phrase into Google and review the search results for similar content.

The downside of this method is that it requires you to manually review the content on each page shown in the search results. It will only work if you suspect specific websites are intentionally copying your content.  

Using Google Alerts

Choose any unique line or phrase from your content and put it in double quotes into the search field. Then, click the Create Alert button. Now, when the system detects copied pieces, you’ll get a Google alert message with details on the website stealing your content. 

Example: If your article contains the unique phrase “AI-powered SERP analysis for predictive ranking”, set up a Google Alert for “AI-powered SERP analysis for predictive ranking” to get notified if this phrase appears elsewhere.

For a more detailed guide on setting up and optimizing your Google Alerts, including advanced tips and best practices, refer to the ultimate guide on how to set up Google Alerts. 

Use specialized SEO tools

SE Ranking has several handy tools to help you combat unauthorized content copying and protect your original work. 

SE Ranking’s AI-powered On-Page SEO Checker helps website owners optimize their site’s pages for target search queries and find out how unique their content is. It assesses your page with 94 parameters, including its structure, keyword usage in the text and headings, readability and content scores, and other vital technical elements. For each issue it finds, the tool gives you specific, actionable recommendations to help you improve your page and get it to the top of the SERPs.

Our AI-powered Content Editor is another powerful content creation and optimization tool. It features an in-built Plagiarism Checker that scans your content and compares it to a large database to verify its originality. It shows you the percentage of your text matching other online sources, its overall uniqueness score, the number of matching phrases, and the number of sources with similar textual content. To ensure you don’t get false positives from your own website pages, you can exclude URLs or entire domains from the plagiarism check.

Using image search and recognition tools 

Image search and recognition tools like Tineye are powerful resources for detecting unauthorized use of your visual content.

Example: We have a custom infographic about “AI Overview presence in search”. Uploading it to Tineye shows us if it appears on other websites without our permission.

You can also try Google Images to check for search similarity. The good thing about Google Images is that it allows you to find visually similar images and discover if your image has been slightly modified.

Using plagiarism detection services

You can check for plagiarism using online tools like Unicheck, Plagiarism Checker, Grammarly, etc.

Example: Copy and paste a portion of your blog post into Plagiarism Checker to see if it detects matches on other websites.

Alternatively, tools like Grammarly or Quetext can scan the whole content piece for plagiarism.

What can you do if your content gets stolen? 

The Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regulate the international protection of original content owners. The rights of content creators are also protected by the civil code of the country where they are registered. This protection comes into force as soon as the content is published. In practice, these laws protect content owners only hypothetically, because many plagiarists can, unfortunately, get around them. 

Contact the plagiarist

The first step in detecting plagiarism should be contacting the plagiarist directly. Contact information will likely be provided somewhere on the site. Once you get it, send a personal message describing the problem. 

Sometimes a website owner may not even be aware that the content on their site or images and videos they use have been stolen. This happens, for instance, when you hire an irresponsible person to do the job. Sometimes, all you have to do is inform the website owner of the problem and that’s it—no more complicated steps.

But if you don’t get any response, you can send a second, more serious email saying that you will bring the case to court with evidence that the stolen content belongs to you. Sometimes this works to scare off plagiarizers, getting them to remove the copied text from their site.

Contact search engine support

If contacting the plagiarizer doesn’t help, try reaching out to your search engine’s support team. This can help you remove stolen content, at least from the search results, but may not always help, especially if you don’t have solid evidence. In such cases, pages with duplicate content will not be removed from the search results. Correspondence with tech support will help you in court if your case goes to trial.

For Google, you can report about stolen content via this form.

File a complaint according to the DMCA law

You can report copyright infringement under the US DMCA, or file an offsetting order if another person has filed such a complaint against you. Before you file a copyright infringement, you should prepare all the necessary documentation to help the court identify you as the original author of the published material. 

Here’s how to file a DMCA notice of infringement:

1. The author files a notice of infringement to an authorized agent of the service provider (or “removal notice”) asking the provider to remove the stolen content from the website of the plagiarist.
2. The copypasted page is removed from the search results if the service agent is registered with the US Copyright Office.
3. The owner of the copycat website is notified about the limitation of their content showing in search results in response to complaints that the provider received under the DMCA law.

The last resort is to take it to court. Be prepared to hire a lawyer and collect tangible evidence of your original authorship of the content.

How to protect your online content from theft

How to protect text content from being stolen

If someone steals your original work, take all possible measures to protect your existing and future publications. 

This is especially relevant to new websites whose pages are not immediately ranked by search engines after posting. If your text is copied and pasted onto a larger, more popular website, you may be wrongfully accused of copypasting.

Here are several methods for protecting your content from plagiarists and proving your authorship.

How to protect images from being stolen

How to protect video content from being stolen

Methods that don’t protect your content from being copied

The rise of generative AI ****** has made it even trickier to prove content originality. This holds especially true given how many unintentional cases of content plagiarism exist. Content creators may use AI tools to reinforce their writing process, believing they are creating original content. However, since AI ****** are trained on vast amounts of existing data, they may inadvertently reproduce phrases, ideas, or structures from their training data. This can lead to portions of their AI-assisted work closely mirroring existing content.

This modern challenge makes it harder to prove originality and spot plagiarism. Content creators must be cautious when using AI tools, and always add their own expertise, value, and personal experience to any AI-generated content. This also ensures your content adheres to EEAT standards.

What are the consequences of copying website content?

No matter the intent, copying website content can lead to severe, hard-to-spot consequences that are hard to combat. Let’s look at the various problems websites can experience if someone steals their content.

Traffic loss

Some of your site’s visitors may go to the copied website instead. If search engines start favoring that website, it may even begin getting higher rankings than your site. And since search engines can’t immediately identify the original source, they may provide searchers with several results with similar content. As a result, the original website’s CTR and traffic volume may decrease.

Drop in rankings and duplicate content  

Having unique content doesn’t guarantee your site will get top search rankings. The website that copied your text can easily appear higher in the SERPs and cause your website to experience a ranking drop. Google, for instance, can sometimes rank plagiarized content above the original one in the SERP. One of the possible reasons explained by John Mueller in Google SEO Office-hours hangout is that copy-cat websites can be of better quality than the site which originally created and posted the content.

John Mueller

Senior Search Analyst / Search Relations team lead

…Maybe it’s worthwhile to also invest in improving the quality of your website overall… Not just that one article that apparently people like.

Also, if you’re the original creator of high-quality content and you regularly update it, search engines will most likely recognize and prioritize your pages. This is because Google uses various signals to “determine which site is the original”. 

Check our blog post on content duplication to dive deeper into its technical aspects and impact on SEO.  

Decreased reader loyalty

Some readers may assume that you’re the one who stole content, not the other way around. Your site may ultimately lose credibility, especially if it’s less popular, younger, or looks worse than the site whose owners copied your content.

Search engine sanctions

Sometimes websites that produce original content undergo search filtering while copycat sites are left unpunished. This can happen if search engines incorrectly identify or recognize the content’s original source.

From a business perspective, content theft also encourages unfair competition. This is especially true and harmful for e-commerce sites. Firstly, competitors can copy your product descriptions. Secondly, they can steal your offer. With minimal effort, they’ll have ready-made texts at their disposal and can make their offer more profitable than yours.

Summing up

You cannot completely protect your content from being copied but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Use one or several of the protection methods mentioned above. 

If plagiarists still succeed at stealing your content despite all the measures you’ve taken to secure it, contact them immediately. If the plagiarists don’t respond to it, contact your search engine’s support team and provide them with evidence. The last option is to collect evidence of your authorship and take legal action.

No matter the outcome, taking proactive steps to protect your work and preparing to defend it is essential to minimizing damage from plagiarism.