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How to Catch People Who Steal Your Content
Below is an updated article I originally had published several years ago by Website Magazine.
As most webmasters with quality content know, online content theft is a widespread problem. If you've created good content, there's a good chance it will be stolen sooner or later.
Below are two free ways to find your stolen text, followed by two methods to help you find image thieves.
Method One: Search Unique Text Passages
All content has unique text passages. By using any good search engine to search for an exact phrase match from your content you can easily find other pages that have that exact phrase.Just copy a unique sentence from your content and paste it into the search engine, place quotation marks around it so only pages with that exact sentence will be returned, then click the search button. Visit the search results to verify your content has been stolen.
If too many pages come back that are not copies of your content you'll need to choose a more unique text passage. If there are no pages but your own with that phrase, your content either hasn't been stolen, or the thieves page hasn't been indexed yet, or the thief has rewritten that phrase (and perhaps the entire article).
Method Two: Hidden PNG Trick
The second method doesn't rely on search engines, it uses your web site's log files. Many content thieves will lift your content, source code and all so they don't have to format it, and many are too lazy to even look through the source code line-by-line. They copy and paste it, and if it looks good on the visible page they consider it mission accomplished.At some place in your content, in the middle of a long paragraph so it blends into the source code as much as possible, use a transparent PNG or GIF image as a spacer between two words. The page will look normal in a browser, but gives you a way to track down the thief.
If someone copies and pastes your content, code and all, into their own page, the transparent image will be called from your server to the thief's server each time the page is accessed. You'll need to use the full URL to the image or it would be a broken link on the thieves website.
Then, by checking your web site's log files you can see where the GIF image is being used. Go there and you've caught a thief.
I've used all both these methods with success, one who had reposted my entire print book online. I slightly prefer the first method as it doesn't rely on the laziness of the thief.
Catching Image Thieves: Method One
Catching image thieves is possible, too. Neither of these methods are foolproof because both are easily foiled. Still, either method can bring success.
An Amusing Aside
Using method one I found a content thief hot-linking to one of my images. I contact the site owner and asked him to take it down. He not only refused, he said I couldn't do anything about it.So I renamed the image on my site and put up a new image with the old name that displayed on his site that read, "I like like to have sex with little animals." I told him to go have a look at his page.
The image was taken down within minutes and I never had trouble with him again. Don't mess with old people. ;)This tactic is the easiest to foil because all they have to do is change the name. As I wrote earlier though, a lot of content thieves are lazy. Some won't bother changing the name. Some will simply hot-link the image, calling it to their site from your server. That's not only stealing the use of your image, it's stealing your bandwidth, too.
You could catch them via your server logs, but most people won't bother, and those who do aren't likely to do it more than once or twice. This method is just easier, if less effective.
Catching Image Thieves: Method Two
This method uses reverse image lookup. It doesn't rely on the image name. A thief would have to edit the image to prevent this method from working, assuming the stolen image has been indexed by the reverse image site.Just go to Tin Eye and paste in the image or paste in the URL to the image. It will tell you if it knows of any other images like it. It's pretty good, too. I rarely see any images that aren't the ones I searched.
Those methods, two for text content and two for images, will help you catch your content thieves, if that's a concern.
