Are you seeking for a solution to locate and delete stolen WordPress content?
You put a lot of effort into your website, but now it’s been stolen, published, and is diverting traffic away from your business.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to locate and remove stolen content in WordPress, whether it’s just a single post or your entire site.
What Happens When Website Content Is Stolen and How Does It Happen?
Blog content scraping is a common way of stealing content. This is when material from your site is taken and reprinted on another site, usually via your RSS feed.
Your content, including formatting, photographs, videos, and other elements, may be copied and pasted directly to another website.
Your article may also be reposted without your permission, with attribution and a link back to your website. Although this may benefit your SEO, you may want to maintain your unique content on your site.
The primary incentive for content theft is usually to benefit from your hard work.
Having your content stolen is a distressing event that, sadly, many WordPress site owners go through.
Just remember that you are not alone and that this is a situation that can be resolved.
The following are the five most prevalent methods for locating and removing stolen content in WordPress.
1. Set up Content Theft Notifications Automatically
Your devoted visitors may inform you that your content has been stolen or that they have seen it elsewhere on the internet.
Fortunately, you won’t have to wait for a kind reader to alert you.
For brand name notifications, Google Alerts is frequently utilized. You submit your website’s name and receive email notifications every time your name is mentioned online.
However, this same feature can be used to notify you when your work is being utilized without your consent.
Go to Google Alerts and sign up for a free account. Next, type your website’s name, URL, or a paragraph from your content.
If you conclude every blog post with the same CTA, for example, you’ll be notified every time it comes online.
After that, you’ll select the ‘Sources’ option. Choose ‘Blogs’ and ‘Web.’ Then press the ‘Create Alert’ button from the drop-down menu.
You’ll now get an email every time your content or website gets cited on the internet.
2. Conduct a manual search for content that has been stolen.
Copyscape is a plagiarism detection application that may also be used to locate stolen information on the internet.
All you have to do is go to Copyscape and type in the URL of your website. You can also type in a page or post URL to determine whether one of your blog posts or website pages has been plagiarized.
The tool’s free edition only shows the top 10 results, which should suffice for most WordPress blogs.
You’ll need to pay for the premium edition if you have a more extensive website or want results for every single mention of your copied content
The tool’s commercial edition allows you to scan up to 10,000 pages with a single click. This might be beneficial if you have a lot of content on your WordPress website.
Grammarly is another manual tool you can use. Grammarly is a well-known online grammar checker.
Grammarly’s premium version includes a plagiarism detector. You can copy and paste your content into the tool, and it will search the internet for any matches.
3. Contact the Registrar or the Offending Host.
What do you do now that you’ve discovered stolen content?
The most straightforward approach to have stolen content removed from a website is to file a DMCA complaint against it.
It’s usually tough to find contact information on a scam website or a site that scrapes your content from your RSS feed.
The IsItWP lookup tool, on the other hand, can help you figure out where the domain and website are hosted.
Type in the domain where your stolen content was published and hit the ‘Analyze Website’ button.
Any available information, including the site hosting business and registrar, will be retrieved by the tool.
Even if the website does not use WordPress, the host and registration are displayed. To get the site taken down, you can contact the host and registrar directly.
Web hosting firms do not want to host websites breaching the law because copying content is prohibited.
DMCA requests are taken seriously by most reputable web hosting businesses, and they will work with you to rectify the matter, including removing the infringing content.
4. Send Google a Takedown Notice
Contacting Google directly is another option for removing stolen content.
You must be cautious when utilizing this method because it necessitates a lot of proof, and submitting fake reports can result in your account being suspended.
There are other options for filing a DMCA complaint with Google, but we recommend using the one found within Google Search Console.
To begin, you’ll need to link your site to Google Search Console. See our tutorial on adding your WordPress site to Google Search Console if you haven’t already.
The Google Search Console Copyright Removal Tool can then be used.
Select ‘Create a new notice’ from the drop-down menu.
This will bring up a screen where you can fill in all of the pertinent details, such as your contact information, the postings that were stolen, and the location of the stolen material.
The more specific information you can supply, the more likely the offending site will be taken down.
You can use a program like Wayback Machine to acquire additional information for your complaint.
This application captures images of your website at various times in time.
As a result, you may compare the date you published the article to the date the guilty site copied it.
5. Make use of a scanner that may also be used as a takedown tool.
You can also utilize the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) tool to search the web for duplicate content.
Type in your URL, and the application will search the internet for sites that have stolen your content.
You may start the takedown procedure by clicking ‘Launch Managed Takedown’ once you’ve located a site that has copied or stolen your work.
It’s worth noting that the results aren’t always stolen stuff. Infographics, backlinks, unlinked brand references, and more are all possibilities.
The discovery and takedown processes are identical to those described above, but instead of using different tools, you may accomplish it all in one spot.
For $10 per month, DMCA provides excellent takedown tools and templates. You can also pay $199 for a full-service takedown, in which their team of professionals will delete your stolen content for you.
Finally, some thoughts on how to deal with content theft
Theft of content is a genuine issue that every website owner has to deal with. Unfortunately, as your website grows in popularity, more people will mimic you.
Some will steal your work outright using automated content scraping technologies, while others will take your content as inspiration and paraphrase it.
It’s pretty aggravating as a website owner to have your stuff stolen. On WPBeginner, we deal with this regularly. With DMCA complaints, the automated bot sites are quickly taken down.
However, because we’re the most popular WordPress resource site, many other WordPress bloggers, theme providers, and even hosting companies often duplicate our title verbatim. They may change the material to make it distinctive, but we know that our articles were the source of inspiration.
This imitation is flattering to us, and it confirms that we are still leading in the correct direction.
If a competitor is constantly replicating your ideas, but it isn’t blatant plagiarism, there isn’t much you can do about it. Don’t let this discourage you; instead, stay focused on your goal of serving your audience.
We hope you found this post helpful in learning how to locate and remove stolen content in WordPress. You might also be interested in learning how to trademark and copyright your blog’s name and logo, as well as how to prevent image theft in WordPress.
Would you please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials if you enjoyed this article? You can also find us on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
