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How To Get Credit When People Copy Your Content

Copy-pasting is perhaps becoming all too popular these days, especially from the point of view of a blogger or webmaster.
The problem is twofold. On one hand, people don’t usually include a link when mailing an interesting article to a friend, but rather they copy the text instead. This part of word-of-mouth doesn’t introduce happy readers to the source of the content – and takes a bite out of your would-be fan-base.
A lot worse are the online copy-cats. Blogs that ridicule copyright and blatantly leech on the articles of other websites. Although bigger sites often dismiss them as a petty bunch, this content ripping can hurt smaller start-up sites much more. Worst of all, there’s almost no way to stop sites with such copied content.

Tynt

Site owners aren’t usually upset by copiers – it simply shows that people like your work. They just want to get the credit and attribution they deserve. How? – with Tynt!
MakeUseOf already discussed Tynt last year as a monitor and tracer application. Sadly, said features are now restricted to the paid version.
The concept of Tynt is incredibly simple. You include a small script on your site, that gives due credit to copied content. Whether it’s a complete article or merely a number of a sentences, Tynt will add a link at the end of the copied fragment. This way, whether in a mail or on a copy-cat blog, people will know the source of the content. View the screenshot above for an illustrated example.

Installing The Script On Your Site

Installing the Tynt script on your site hardly takes more than a few minutes, and is relatively easy. This tutorial presumes you have access to your site’s HTML files – i.e. a self-hosted website. Alternatively, read here on how to add Tynt to a variety of blogging services.
On the Tynt website, sign up with your site’s domain, a contact email, and a password. On the next page, you can already see a generated sample script.
The free version does not allow for a whole lot of customization. At most, you can include an optional Creative Commons license under the link, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.
Next, select and copy the script at the bottom of the page. We’ll need to add this to our site for Tynt’s magic to work.
Use FTP or your host’s online file manager to access your site’s HTML and PHP files. Add the script at the bottom of all your site pages, just before the tag. Save, exit, and make sure your old page doesn’t remain cached.
And you’re done. From now on, when someone copies a fragment from one of those pages, it’ll include a link back to your website.

Advantages Of Using Tynt

Using Tynt has a lot of advantages, including one you wouldn’t think of at first glance. Here’s what you can expect out of it.
  • Attribution – obviously. With Tynt, you’ll receive due credit for your work. You’ll also view trackbacks of blogs that would’ve otherwise been incognito.
  • Traffic – by including those links, copied fragments will create additional traffic back to your site. Especially if you can sneak them in on copy-cat blogs.
  • SEO Benefits – think about it. Starting now, a lot more sites will be linking back to you, thus giving your search rank a big boost.
What’s your stance on copied content, and how do you deal with it? Do you know any other tips for website owners? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
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