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ID your content
You can ID your content in several ways to notify search engines that you are the originator. When I first started to blog I was extremely annoyed when I found that feeder sites were scraping my content and taking full credit for it in search engines. I thought, “How is it possible that someone could pull something off a new site and rank for it in search engines?” I later discovered that it was the feed that was notifying scrapers I had new content AND Google that it was mine at the same time, so in reality, I was in good shape.
Here are a couple things that help notify search engines (and humans *see rss feeds*) that you have new content:
Google Sitemaps - Ping Google to notify that you have new content for their bots to crawl. Here are some third party tools for sitemap creation if you do not have a blog.
Google Webmaster Central - Join, login and observe what is going on in the console as Google does the same, if something is not right you will see errors, visit Google Groups for help.
RSS Feeds - Google loves feeds as a way to ID content, so much that they just wrote up: Tips on using feeds
Update Services - Blogs ping update services that you have new content automatically. An example of an update service is Google Blog Search @ http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
Blogs - Blogs by default come with RSS feeds, Atom, Sitemaps and Update Services built in so they are perfect for pinging search engines AND humans via RSS feed readers.
It is smart to use multiple tools to ID content. With incoming links and pagerank increases, scrapers and feeders will no longer rank #1 for your content. Search engines like Google did not forget about you afterall.
This writing was inspired from a question asked in Google Groups:
What to do when sites steal your content - The answer should be simple, start blogging.
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February 21st, 2007 at 6:36 am
I use similar techniques. I’ve also set up a Google Alert to notify me when my new content is found. I figure this is a good way to test whether my copy is being found before other copies. So far so good!
February 21st, 2007 at 7:02 am
Great advice, you also can see who might be referencing your content this way as well.
February 22nd, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Yep, I second Marios on this technique. In addition to that I also use MyFreeCopyRight.
Cheers!
Alpesh Nakar
Update: I killed the link Alpesh, I do not like paid copyright stuff, there are plenty of free ways to accomplish this same task and if you use Wordpress there are free plugins for this. -Aaron