Sometimes you spend hours, maybe days to prepare a unique article for your website but it takes seconds for someone to copy that post of yours and share it through his/her website and it is not fair, right? We are in digital age and even ordinary people can easily start a blog with WordPress and they can put whatever they want in those blogs. Even if Google punish those websites which copy content from other websites by lowering their ratings but due to the information age, people can easily advertise and feature their content through social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Instagram; therefore, search engines are not one and only authority anymore.
Most of the blogs, including big and popular ones, copy content from each other. They might not be copying and pasting contents sentence by sentence in order to keep their Google ranking high but when they see an interesting topic from other websites, they will probably share it by changing couple of sentences or after rewriting it. They don’t deny this fact and some of them are pretty honest about it. Top news/media websites like Mashable and Huffington Post are not even trying to hide it, they put HT (heard through) below the articles and give credit the websites.
In order to stop people from copying your content, it seems logical to disable selection and right click from your website because most people won’t bother reading and writing the whole article sentence by sentence and simply go to other websites to find another article, right?
Unfortunately, the answer is no and there is more than one reason that proves it is a huge mistake.
1. Bad User Experience
Most people visit your website innocently to read or learn something, not to steal your content. When they read something they don’t know about or when they read more about, they might want to google it from other sources. The easiest way to do it is to copy and paste the part they want to investigate on Google. However, when they realize you can’t do that, they might get annoyed or just leave your website. Some of them might even think it as a technical problem.
2. Slower Website
Most of the website owners use WordPress since it is easy to make and use. Also, there are a couple of plugins to disable text selection and right click from your website. But the thing is; every plugin you install on your WordPress site will make your website slower. Especially the plugins that contain JavaScript make your website dramatically slower and the only way to disable text selection is using JavaScript. If your website takes too long to load, you’ll lose visitors, influence and sales. 1/4 of the visitors will leave your website if it doesn’t load within 4 seconds and every plugin you add, every JavaScript code you use adds seconds or milliseconds to loading time.
3. Easy Solution
If someone visits your website to steal your content, disabling text selection will probably not stop him/her. The person who wants to steal your content would not be a common person, he/she would probably have a website or an editor for a professional website and this kind of people can disable JavaScript for a specific website within seconds. For instance, in Google Chrome:
Settings -> Content Settings -> Manage Exceptions -> Enter Website URL -> Block
See? That doesn’t take even a minute. Once they disable the JavaScript, they are able to select text, right click; in short they can do whatever they want.
It takes to install plugins and make your website slower for you to disable text selection but it takes seconds to disable JavaScript for someone to steal your content.
So What To Do?
The logical solution would be old-fashioned way. First, send them a polite email about the situation. Some websites accept contributors and the website owner could be a good guy. Therefore, send them a nice email that there is a thief in their ranks and that person steal your content. Once your content is removed, you can move on.
If it doesn’t work and website owner has dirty on his/her hands, your hands will get dirty too. Since they steal content, that means their Google ranking is low and they use social media websites to feature their content. Then you should hit them where it hurts most. Open a fake account from that social media and spam their social media accounts with your fake account. Tell them how dirty they are and inform their followers that they are nothing but a thief.
Final Thought: If someone copy this article and put his/her website, now that would be hilarious.
