How to Turn Content Theft to Your Advantage – and Get Hundreds of Links in the Process

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You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect link bait. You’ve interviewed people, conducted surveys and bought images, confident that a plethora of links will soon shoot deep into your site.

Then, without permission or attribution, a competitor grabs your material, puts it on their site – and possibly even starts ranking above you.

Do you feel a wave of anger? Don’t. Because we are going to teach you how to turn copyright theft to your advantage – and gain hundreds of new links in the process.

Tip 1

“Excuse me, I am ringing to discuss a breach of copyright,” I said recently after ringing one of our  competitors.

A phrase guaranteed to send a shiver of fear down a business owner’s back – especially when they are in the same country as you!

I was ringing to discuss the theft of our famous ‘e-cigarette interviews with scientists‘ series. But instead of demanding the content be taken down or taking the matter to court, I asked for all links to be replaced. We now have several links from one of our biggest competitors – and, according to Google Analytics, traffic too.

So, when your copyright is stolen, don’t get mad – get links.

Tip 2

You can even encourage this to take place by giving permission for your content to be re-used – on the condition that it is attributed with a live link.

I don’t do this with every article for duplicate content issues, but adding this permission helps some of your content to spread virally.

I’ve even created an embed form with some posts so that all our readers have to do is copy and paste the html of the article.

While some links generated this way won’t be counted because of duplicate content issues, three webmasters have told me that they have translated our interviews into other languages: French, Spanish and German. All, of course, with attribution and links.

Bonus tip 1: Consider pointing links at your new articles and waiting until your content has been indexed before offering permission for re-use. That way your competitors are unlikely to outrank you for the same content.

Bonus tip 2: Consider adding summaries of your content for re-use. You can put this on a separate page and add some no-index no-follow code to reduce duplicate content issues.

Tip 3

When someone copies and pastes a piece of text from my article a little piece of text appears below.

Read more here.

I’ve added a little piece of code from a site from a site called Tynt.

Tynt tracks theft of your copyright, and generates an automatic link every time theft happens.

In the last month Tynt has generated 292 links to my content.

Best of all, the service is entirely free!

(Note: Daily SEO tip has reviewed a similar service here: Track and get links from those who copy your content)

Over to you?

What other ways do you know to turn copyright theft to your advantage?

James Dunworth is the co-author of “Electronic Cigarettes (E Cigarettes) as a potential harm reduction product”, a study carried out by the TobaccoHarmReduction.org institute at the University of Alberta, and the IT director of ECigaretteDirect.co.uk, the UK distributor of the NJOY electronic cigarette.