Track your Digital Fingerprint

Our last post we set up a Digital Fingerprint which we can now track to find out where our last post has been reproduced.

Add a keyword or key-phrase to your Feed out-put

The Digital Fingerprint we defined was the key-phrase “Sunny weather in Vouliagmeni”. This Fingerprint has been added on top of our post’s feed only. On the Original post the key-phrase is not visible while on all feed imported posts elsewhere you can see it:

Sunny weather in Vouliagmeni on YORGOO Publishing

Fingerprint on YORGOO Press

Tracking with Google Alerts

Google Alerts (Beta) tracks for you the fingerprint.

The Google Alert search term that incorporates my fingerprint (but doesn’t alert me when publishing on my own site) is (all what follows):
“Sunny weather in Vouliagmeni.” -site:yorgonestoridis.com

RSS Blog Search

Automated RSS Blog Search results results can be obtained from additional sources:

RSS Blog Search

How to react to Content theft?

In spite the fact that it may appear to be difficult or unreasonably expensive to pursue culprits internationally, there are a few simple means you can deploy and which we will have a look at in a next post.

How to Implement your Digital Fingerprint and Tracker

There are multiple solutions available. Semiomantics offers customized solutions for WordPress based blogs to fit Authors’ needs and preferences. Contact Bianca Gubalke at bianca(at)ycademy.com.

Track Infringements and Copyright Violations

How to find out about Copyright violations? Or how to track your stolen content?

Tags or Content

You have the possibility to either add a specific tag to all of your posts and track that tag or you could add to each post a particular word or phrase which only exists on your creations.

The idea is good, however you don’t want to mess up your content on your site with a meaningless code or phrase and you don’t want to define a a code which is easy to detect and to remove.

Digital Fingerprint is a solution

A Digital Fingerprint is a secret unique insert into your posts. There are very sophisticated systems to implement and to track such fingerprints but to keep it simple: we can just add a secret phrase to our feeds and have them printed out on the receiving end. Google and other Search tools will then track the expression for us.

Here is an example: I will add a Digital Fingerprint to this post and then track it. I have checked Google by doing a narrow search on my key phrase and there is zero result.

My Fingerprint for this exercise is the key-phrase: Sunny weather in Vouliagmeni.

In a few hours we will track this post on Google and see where it ended up.

Protect Content with Copyrights

My previous post included some interesting features in terms of Copyright mentions. There are on-site and off-site solutions which you may have noticed. The post discusses the various possibilities adding copyright notices, not their efficiency against content scrapers.

Copyright on-site

On my site I publish a Copyright mention in the footer:

These Copyright notices are standard and most WordPress blogs add them automatically. Such notices can be more or less sophisticated; automated vCard notices are possible and exist in may themes by default.

Copyright Yorgo Nestoridis

Copyright using vCard

For the purpose of this example I have used the vCard entry at the bottom of the post, just above the comment area as visible here:

Copyright Yorgo Nestoridis vCard

Copyright using Author Box

The author box is part of the post content and therefore an on-site as well as off-site feature:

Copyright Author

The disadvantage of the html author box is that it messes up the clean code of the post. Such boxes should be edited in clean code and inserted accordingly.

Copyright off-site

As mentioned above, the Authors Box at the bottom of the post is part of the post and therefore transferable by Feed (RSS, Atom). Content scrapers usually scrap by using feeds and by importing content to their own web sites.

Author Boxes with clean content are interesting and accepted also by most directories, for as long as they contain only one link.

Copyright added to the Feed

An interesting idea is to add copy right notices to the out-put feed. The principle is: you add automatically a copyright notice to every post in your feeds, without having these notices on display on your own website.

The previous post has been syndicated into YORGOO Publishing; here is how the post was automatically printed:

Copyright on top of the post:

The original post on Yorgo Nestoridis shows no copyright on top:

Yorgo Nestoridis Blog

The Copyright notice added to the feed shows however automatically on every site syndicating my content as follows:

Copyright Yorgo Nestoridis on YORGOO Publishing

The same is true for Ycademy which syndicated from YORGOO Publishing:

Copyright Yorgo Nestoridis on Ycademy

The above screenshots represent post pages where the Copyright notice on top of the post bears active hyperlinks. In case the default excerpt is printed, as on the home page of YORGOO Press blogs or on Ycademy, then the same notice is served, however without active links.

Copyright Yorgo Nestoridis on Ycademy

Copyright at the bottom of the post:

The Authors Box has been imported while the vCard has disappeared as we did not embed it into the code (loop) but served it using an in-line widget. To pass on the vCard, the corresponding code can be embedded into the WP code. The vCard delivers clean code and could be a better solution then the HTML Author’s Box.

Author Box on YORGOO Publishing

My preference

The most visible notice is delivered on top of the post, however in a more elegant way than the shrewd wording chosed for the purpose of this example.

A nice notice could be for example: “Published by Yorgo Nestoridis on YORGOO Press” including the corresponding links.