When Someone Steals Your Online Articles
I’m feeling a little annoyed. Last week, I spent quite a bit of time writing a new article I was really excited about. Today I checked my stats and saw it’s already pulling some traffic and gaining some new subscribers for me. I thought… how cool is that!
Then I did a quick Google search to see if it had been reprinted anywhere. (If you want to do your own search like this, type the title or a few sentences from your article into Google. Be sure to put quotes like these ” around your search terms.)It hadbeen… and to my dismay, one publisher had liked the article so much they took it for their own. My name is nowhere to be found, and it looks like it’s their own stuff.
If this hasn’t happened to you yet, it will soon. And when it does, you can find a lot of information here about how to handle the situation.
There was a time when I would get up in arms about my content being stolen, and sometimes I still do. But in this particular instance, I’m going to let it go.
Here’s why:
1. The “blogger” (and I use that term loosely) hasn’t even identified himself on his blog. He cares so little for his reputation he doesn’t bother to tell others who he is. With some digging, I could probably find some way to contact him, but I doubt he’ll care.
2. Yes, I’m missing out on a backlink, but I’m pretty sure I can do without a backlink from that particular site.
3. I have bigger fish to fry. If I’m going to spend my time after anyone for stealing my content, I’ll save it for the big sites who leave out my link and my bio. Those are the ones I really need. And I’d rather use what time I do have to write my next article.
4. I can accept that some content theft is a cost of doing business. In my university days, I worked at the neighborhood 7-11. When we did the month-end numbers, there was always an expected loss. As long as the loss was within reason, we let it go.
And that’s what you’ll have to decide for yourself – which content stealers are worth going after, and which are better to just forget about.
