How To Prevent My Website Content From Being Copied? - 6 Ways To Prevent Your Website Content From Being Copied

Date First Published: 23rd April 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Development

Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers

Difficulty Level: 4/10

Learn about how to prevent your website content from being copied in this article.

Wondering how to prevent your website content from being copied by others without your permission? If you are very worried about someone else plagiarising your work and claiming that they created it, then the safest option is to simply not publicly post it on the internet. However, everyone has some work that they want to publicly share on the internet in order to help other people. If you have been working hard on an article, a risk that you face is that someone will copy it and use it as their own, which is a form of plagiarism.

Website content that is publicly available is very easy to copy and republish in that it is possible for anyone with internet access to copy and paste it and republish it under a different website and use it as their own, which is a form of plagiarism. Whilst it is not possible to completely stop anyone from copying and republishing your content without permission, there are some things you can do to discourage people from copying and republishing your content without permission. Below are 6 ways to prevent your website content from being copied.

1. Add A Copyright Notice To Your Website

The first thing that you should do to discourage other people from copying and republishing your content is to add a copyright notice to your website. Nearly all websites have a copyright notice located in the footer which contains the copyright icon (©), along with the name of the copyright holder and sometimes the year of publication. This makes it clear to your website visitors that the content is copyrighted as it is visible on every page.

If you want to provide more information about copyright, you can create a copyright policy page, or include a copyright section in your terms of use page that states something like "All content on our site, including articles and images are copyrighted. Any copying, distribution, reproduction, or selling is strictly prohibited".

2. Track Your Content Using A Service

You can sign up for a service, like Google Alerts or Copyscape to monitor the internet for copies of your content. You will have to pay to use this feature on Copyscape, but users with paid accounts have a feature to automatically monitor the Web for copies of content and will be emailed as soon as it appears. You can check up to 10 pages for a monthly fee and have to pay an extra fee per month for each additional page. Copyscape does also have a range of free banners you can use on your site that say 'Protected by Copyscape' to discourage people from copying your content.

Google Alerts is a free service provided by Google that allows you to monitor the Google search results for new results containing certain words or phrases. You can even copy and paste your whole content into the search query field and use quotation marks so that you will only be notified of exact matches. This method will help you track textual content that displays elsewhere on the Web, but it will only be able to detect text that has been copied word-for-word. People often use synonyms or rephrase content to make it look new and prevent it from being detected as duplicate content. Since most people have a Google account, you will be able to use this service without having to sign up for any additional accounts.

You can also use a plagiarism checker to find out whether your content appears elsewhere on the Web. You will have to manually check every time, but you can find out if your original content appears on different sources. As stated above, plagiarism checkers only detect text that is copied word-for-word and cannot detect rephrased or spun articles. For more information about plagiarism checkers, see this article.

3. Add A Watermark To Your Images

You can consider adding a watermark to your own images to discourage people from copying and using them without your permission. These identify you as the copyright holder of the image. You should place it in the middle of the photo to make it difficult to remove, not the corners or the bottom of the image as they can be easily cropped out by other people. Even if people do use your images without your permission, they will have a watermark that has your source in it, which is a way of promoting your website. People are less likely to want to copy an image with someone else’s source in it.

If you decide to add a watermark to your images, make sure that you own the copyright to them and that they are not someone else’s images. You do not want to claim ownership of someone else’s image. In addition, make sure that the watermarks will not reduce the quality of the images.

4. Ensure That All Your Pages Have Internal Links

This method won’t prevent anyone from copying and republishing your content, but it will make it harder. This is because if someone tries to copy and paste your text or download your page so that they can republish it, it will contain links to your website. If they republish it and don’t notice the links, the links will point to your website, which will make the original source clear.

When copying and pasting content or downloading a page, it is very easy for someone else to remove all the links, but it will increase the amount of time it takes for them to copy and republish it.

5. Use A CDN, Like Cloudflare

If you use a CDN, like Cloudflare, you can block attempts to download or scrape your website by adding firewall rules. This is because downloading or scraping your website can be used to republish it under a different source. Adding rules, like requiring users to complete a CAPTCHA when they view a page the first time will prevent your pages from being accessed by bots that download or scrape your content.

6. Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking is the process of linking to and displaying a resource, such as an image or video, hosted on an external server instead of the website owner downloading it and uploading it to their own server. Hotlinking can be used to display resources without your permission or without mentioning the original source. This is because it is not obvious that an image is hotlinked as it blends in with the page and the only way it can be seen is by viewing the source code. In addition, this can use up a lot of bandwidth, which will become an issue for if your hosting plan has limited bandwidth.

When hotlinking, no copy of your work is created, but it is still possible for another site to use it as their own, which is a form of plagiarism. This is a reason why you should prevent hotlinking.

There are three ways that you can prevent hotlinking. You can use a CDN, like Cloudflare and turn hotlink protection on. You can turn hotlink protection in your hosting provider settings on or block it using the .htaccess file. For more information on how to block hotlinking using the .htaccess file, see this article.

Things You Shouldn't Do To Prevent Your Website Content From Being Copied

Below are 3 things that some websites have done to prevent their content from being copied, but are not recommended. These ways of protecting website content go over the top and have a negative impact on user experience.

1. Disabling right-clicking

Some websites disable right-clicking using JavaScript or WordPress plugins. Right-clicking on the mouse will do nothing when visiting websites that have disabled this option. This causes serious usability issues and does nothing more than irritate your users. Most users use the right-click menu for legitimate reasons, like translating and printing the page and can become irritated if this option is not available.

This will also make a website look unprofessional and is completely unnecessary. It is unlikely that someone would sign up for an account on a website that disables right-clicking and displays a notice that says 'Copy protected' every time you right-click.

Overall, disabling right click does nothing to prevent any website content from being copied. Users can access the source code by adding "view-source:" before the page URL in the address bar, disable JavaScript to disable the code that disables right-clicking, and use the keyboard shortcut 'Ctrl + S' to save the webpage and all of its files in local storage.

2. Disabling text selection

Disabling text selection is another example of something that causes usability issues and does nothing more than irritate your users. It will also get visitors curious and make them want to know why. It is like you are assuming that anyone who selects the text will copy your work and take the credit for it. Selecting text does not always mean copying for unethical purposes. Some users select text to remember where they are and some copy and paste it to a document on their computer so that they can read it offline.

3. Adding too many copyright notices

When adding copyright notices to the page, a mistake that some people make is flooding the page with copyright notices. They will add copyright notices under every image, every article, and on unusual positions on the page, like the sidebar. This makes a website look unprofessional. All that you need to do is add a copyright notice to the footer and include a copyright section in your terms of use document. You don’t need to add copyright notices under every image and article.

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