We’ve been looking into the issue of site visitors using cut and paste to “steal” content. Not on this site, particularly, but on others.
The issue is that many visitors don’t use the built-in “share” functions – they simply copy and paste content into social media, or more often, e-mails. The problem with that is that the site doesn’t get anything back from this – no backlink, nada.
There are a couple of (paid-for) WordPress plugins which address this issue: Maxblogpress “bring my blog traffic back” (bmbtb), and “Covert Copy Traffic”, for instance.
Look a bit closer, though, and there is a FREE plugin called “copylink” which does most of the same. It may not be as polished, but hey, it’s FREE.
Copylink offers tracking facilities as well, so you can actually see who is copying, and what the actual content is. If someone IS seriously abusing your content, you can then block them.
Awesome!
We’ve rolled copylink out to most of our sites, and are monitoring the results…
We have no problem with visitors sharing content – if we did, we wouldn’t publish it on the open web. But we DO want the content to be attributed to our site.