Have you ever had someone steal the text off your website?

Whilst I am flattered that another web development company might choose to use our text on their website, it serves as a warning just how anonymous the web, and how easy it is to take things that aren’t yours.

Google doesn’t like it if two websites have the same text, and will look at the two and judge which one is the copier and which wrote the original text. It discounts the copier (and often won’t rank it for any terms) and awards the original writer with the power of the ranking.

When you write text for your website the copyright is immediately owned by you, just like with other original works like art, design or photography. Someone infringes your right if they steal your text and use it on their website.

I believe it’s important to know who is copying my text, so periodically I run Google searches for key sentences in quote marks to check is someone’s inadvertently borrowed some of my words. If I find some (and I inevitably do) I ask for a link to my website as a credit to me as the author, or I ask them to remove it. Over the years I’ve had our website copied about 15 times, and snippets and paragraphs taken about 200 times.

There’s a great website for checking to see if someone’s copied your text, have a look at CopyScape.