Content is the king! So goes the age old adage in the world of website design. Quite obviously then, your website content is a treasured possession. With all the time and effort that you out in developing quality content, you would like to see it work in your favor.
However, what makes for a killing feeling is when you see your own content posted on some other web page without any knowledge of yours. Moreover, your search engine rankings get affected as a result of duplicate content. No matter what you do to protect you content, hackers and thieves are often able to get away with your content. But there is still help at hand. Here are some tips that will help you to discourage content theft and make the process more difficult.
Copyright your Website Content
Copyrighting your website can protect against blatant content theft. When you have copyrights for your website content, then you can protect it from people who altogether copy the contents word by word and place it on their website without giving you any credits. Go to the Copyright Office website at register your website there. The earlier you do this, the better. So make sure you complete the application within three months of launching your website. You will need pay a processing fee apart from sending copies of all the web pages whose content you need to protect. Also, create a CD that contains copies of all the files of your website and keep it as backup for yourself. Insert the copyright meta tag on all your web pages that has your company name or website name. When the application has been accepted, you will be send a 'Certificate of Registration'. This will entitle you to sue any person or company who steals your work and ask them for compensation. Moreover, when you win the case, you can also recover all the costs for lawyer fees and statutory damages.
Altering the Website Code
This technique may not save your content from professional hackers and thieves. However, you can save it from amateurs. Remove all the unnecessary spaces in the HTML code of your website. This will make it difficult for people to read through the whole code and find individual text options. Thus, it will not be easy for thieves to simple lift your content filled web pages. Another way is to disable the right click function of your website by using JavaScript. This can prevent people from selecting text and images on your website and copying it on some other places. However, this can get pretty annoying for genuine visitors who come to your website and want to take some information.
Change the Text Contents
You can use Photoshop or just any other image editing software and change the text elements into images. Here is how you can do that. Select the text that you want to change. Open a new image file and select an appropriate size that will accommodate the body of the text. Sharpen the image. Save the file. Don't forget that large images with very high resolution can make web pages to load slower. Therefore, its better to save the text images in medium resolution. When you upload the file to your website, people would still be able to print the file. But then they will have to re-type every word of it to reuse the contents.
