Image via Wikipedia

On Thursday something happened that I never thought would happen to me. My content was stolen.

I always thought why would someone take my stuff? It’s not that good. Seriously.

But it happened. Not once, but twice in the same day and then it got me wondering how many other times has it happened that I don’t know about. How many times has this happened to other bloggers out there and how many of them don’t even know it.

When I found out I was shocked. Annoyed. Angry. I wanted to do everything I could to get my content removed from those sites. I spent the better part of the afternoon working on it and with the help of some wonderful people and one in particular, Ashley, I was able to start making some headway.

Alright, I’m going to share with you a few things that I found out.

• Look at your spam comments because that’s how I found out. There were trackbacks in there that needed to be approved and I didn’t recognize the sites so I checked them out first. Both sites grabbed my entire post… images and all… and had a link back to my blog at the end of it (this doesn’t make it right).
• Copyright your content! I use a service called My Free Copyright and ever post I make is copyrighted. I get an email that I save for each post. By registering you get a public record of all your content that is saved on their databases.
• If you find that your content has been stolen then contact them and tell that you want it removed. Don’t ask.
• For me I went around in circles. For the first site I found I found who was hosting it, called them, and was told to email their copyright claims department. Which I did. I then found out that they don’t really host that site so I was pretty much out of luck.
• Find information on some sites that steal content is like finding a needle in a haystack. There is nothing on them! No about, no contact, nothing.
• Sites that are hosted by WordPress.com seem to be harder to turn in. I’m still working on that one!

Now I’m not going to go into everything that I learned. Instead I’m just going to share with you all the links that were shared with me.

Lorelle on WordPress has a lot of great information and even more helpful links.

Problogger, of course, has a list of his own.

BlogHer also shares some tips on protecting your content.

I hope that this never happens again and I hope that it doesn’t happen to you either. It’s wrong for anyone to take your content that you worked so hard on, something you put your heart & soul into.

Hopefully I’ve helped you!