Not much gets under skin of content providers more than those who rip off content. A common online scenario plays out as follows: You write (or commission) some terrific content. You post it on your website only to find various blogs have “borrowed” or flat-out stolen the content for their website. Nine times out of ten, there is no link back to your site and you get no credit for the content at all. Then, to add insult to injury, thanks to your content, these sites rank higher in the search engines than you do.

Content Issues

The stolen content problem is tremendous in the online world. Articles, sales pages and the like are quickly becoming the power behind the internet and success with websites, but to have your hard work stolen is more than frustrating – it’s infuriating.

When your content is stolen, you have limited options. You can have your lawyer send a cease and desist letter. This only works inside the United States however, which may not be enough for the many sites which copy content who happen to be located overseas. You can contact the search engines and submit a complaint or letter letting the company know of the problem, but you may not see any results. You can also contact the company directly letting them know the terms of use for your content. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind them using it if they included a link to your site or your byline.

Get Link Juice

Which brings us nicely stolen content’s possible silver lining. If two blogs are running the same articles, but one is ranked above you, the search engines must feel their blog is more substantial and worthy of higher ranks. Now, in 2008, websites will be able to “steal” link juice from theft sites by posting links back to your own website in the comments and summaries of each article.

Then, should your article be stolen, you’ll at least benefit from the back links the thief has generated. If the site stealing content is a puny little thing, you won’t be getting any increases in traffic or in PR, but if your content containing links is picked up by a blog or website more powerful than your own, you’re looking at some free traffic and hopefully a great deal of free link power.

The Wrong Kind of Links

While you hope that nobody ever steals your content, the chances of content theft increase as your site becomes more popular and more highly ranked. A major concern for many anxious to start putting links in their blog feed or summaries back to their own website is the likelihood that Google, or one of the other search engines, will punish your site for tricking other sites into giving you links.

Thus far it doesn’t appear as though this will be the case. You may run into trouble if you use highly targeted keywords to link to your site, but if you just use the name of the site itself to generate the link back, there shouldn’t be any trouble. Don’t get greedy, although the temptation to one up the sites that steal is very strong. While it’s tempting to squeeze every drop of link juice out of content theft sites, don’t. Not only can your site be penalized by Google for iffy links, you could also damage your reputation. And in the online world, reputation is everything.