Occasionally, I find that my competition steals images and text snippets from my Arizona Mortgage pages at AZWM.com.
I am lucky that it only happens occasionally, because the fact is: My site ranks highly in Arizona mortgage searches, so my competition pretty much imitates everything I do.
I try to prevent this from happening in two ways:
1. I subscribe to Copyscape.com for $4.95 per month and it crawls the web looking for duplicate content. It uses a sophisticated algorithm to find copies of your content on the web.
It doesn't have to be an exact duplicate. If somebody rewrites your article using their own words...a common technique amongst internet scum-- Copyscape will find it and tell you that the article is "57% identical."
I have found several of my posts that had quite obviously been rewritten.
For $4.95 per month, I get automatic weekly emails that tell me if somebody "borrows" my content and posts it anywhere on the web.
You can check your site right now, manually, for free-- at Copyscape.com though. Check it out. The automated service is what you pay for, should you choose to. (I am not an affiliate of Copyscape and I am not making any money from promoting them.)
2. I disable text selection and right-clicking on my page.
This isn't going to stop anybody who knows what they are doing. People can always view your source code, find your CSS file and get any image they want.
But the type of people who steal images usually are not smart enough to get past the right-click and text selection disabling. These people are lazy and viewing your source code and figuring it out will be too much for their tiny minds.
If you want to see this in action, check out my Mortgage Glossary, for one. (It will open in a new window.) You can see that you can't right click anywhere on the page or select any text to copy and paste...
If you want to try to see it in action on my images, try it on my homepage at AZWM.com (I am not linking directly to that page in this post... Sorry.)
Do you want to disable text-selection and right clicking on your page?
If you have a Wordpress site, like I do at AZWM.com, just install the FREE Wordpress Copyright Pro Plug-In and activate it. You're all done!
If you don't have Wordpress (and why not?!?), just cut and paste the following code in between the <head> tags at the top of the page you want to protect...
(If you need help understanding this, go ahead and leave a comment. If you have no control over your site's HTML though-- if you are using a real estate template pay-by-the-month deal-- you might not be able to get to your <HEAD> code.)
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<script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript">
function disableselect(e)
{
return false
}
function reEnable()
{
return true
}
//if IE4+
// disable text selection
document.onselectstart=new Function ("return false")
//if NS6
if (window.sidebar)
{
//document.onmousedown=disableselect
// the above line creates issues in mozilla so keep it commented.
document.onclick=reEnable
}
function clickIE()
{
if (document.all)
{
(message);
return false;
}
}
// disable right click
document.oncontextmenu=new Function("return false")
</script>
This is definitely not foolproof. It wouldn't stop me if I was in the content-stealing business.
But the average Realtor who just wants to steal the images that you paid for? Yeah, this should stop him or her. Like I said, anybody who is stupid enough to steal other people's content...probably easily fooled.
If you need help with this, let me know. I can't guarantee anything-- if I am unfamiliar with your platform, but for the most part, I should be able to help you.
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