Writers Beware! Who Is Stealing Your Articles And How To Find The Crooks

If you are writing articles for online article directories, you are doing so because you can help people with your insights into business, technology, home and family issues or any other category topic. A benefit of sharing your input with others is that some readers will inquire into your business by clicking the link to your website, blog or other online offer. The reward for a well-written article is that it may be picked up and published on other websites who post your article, respect your copyright and provide a link back to your website or blog. This helps the publishers develop content for their site while expanding your recognition and link network. It’s a simple give-and-take relationship, which benefits everyone involved, readers, writers and publishers.

The success of this system is based on the honesty and integrity of directory service to maintain a quality forum for article placement, authors to provide unique, informative articles and publishers to adhere to the simple policies associated with reprinting articles on and off line. To wit; providing credit to the author and a link in the article pointing back to the author’s site, blog or other offer. They get the content and you get the credit. And for the most part, this system and relationship between the parties works well… very well.

However, there are crooks out there that will steal your articles, post them on their site, remove your name and link from the article and deprive you of any and all benefit from the hard work you put in your articles. It’s hard to track the thief’s on the Internet but there are a few things you can do to increase your awareness of who has your articles, what types of organizations steal articles and why they steal them

1. The major culprits of article piracy are blogs. Why blogs? There is no real accountability when a crook sets up a blog through the numerous “free blog sites” online. There is no practical way to identify the webmasters of the sites if they wish to remain anonymous and most blog services do not keep track of personal data on people who are setting up the blogs. Contacting the free blog sites or the blogger themselves is nearly impossible and extremely time consuming.

2. The major motivation to steal articles is to develop site content for Google rank and traffic.

3. These thieves create “article blogs sites” that have Google advertising (called Google AdSense) plastered all over them—when people click the ads, the blogger makes some money per click.

In other words, they are using your article to build their site to get people to read and click the ads to make money. What really grinds me is that an article-thief doesn’t have to strip away the author information to accomplish the goals they have to make money with Google AdSense—it would work fine if they operated honestly and ethically.

Tracking is not a perfect science but it can help you locate these thieves. Simply copy the first few lines from your article and paste them into the Google search area (or other search engine) and click “search”… If your article is out there, the search engine will bring up links either directly to your article or to websites that have matching text located on their site. Then, just follow the trail to find your article. Like I say, it’s not a perfect science but it is a way to monitor your articles. The less intelligent pinhead thieves may provide a way to be contacted. Another technique to find out who is linking to your site through your articles is to type into the Google search area the following command: LINK: YOURSITE.COM

Long story short, you are risking your work when writing for article directories and you will most certainly lose control of your literary work once it is posted in these public domains. Everybody has to make a decision for themselves and you should keep this in mind when posting your articles anywhere online.

I do not want to discourage you from writing and submitting your articles, as article thieves are a minority and not a majority. But I do encourage you to check your articles from time to time.

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