Surely more than one has faced problems of content theft by other websites, which can be annoying. This inconvenience generally leads webmasters to take desperate solutions to try to protect content published in WordPress.
Sometimes, it can also be seen how the pages that copy our content without permission not only do not accredit the work of the original author, but also obtain better search engine positions. In this article we are going to talk in depth about this issue of stolen content, which does not have an easy solution, but the most serious thing is that it often leads to new webmasters to make mistakes due to their despair.
How to protect content published in WordPress
I will be very clear,
once you publish your content online and it is available on the internet it is impossible to avoid being stolen or copied
.
There is no miraculous plugin that protects your content against theft or unauthorized copying.
It is true that there are several plugins whose purpose is to protect your content, but the reality is that their damages are greater than the benefits they provide us.
If we face a case of content theft, our first action should be to report the website you are copying to us through the form that Google has enabled for it in
this link
.
You should keep in mind that Google will not take action immediately
, so once the web is reported it can take a while to see the results. Unfortunately this is the little we can do to protect ourselves and yet, we have no guarantee that Google will take short-term measures to help us.
Despite all this, we must be patient and wait for the website that steals / copies our content to be penalized, we must never resort to desperate measures or miraculous plugins that promise to protect our content.
In the WordPress plugins directory, there are different plugins to protect our contents and whose functionalities are the following:
-
Disable the right click.
-
Disables the ability to select text and copy it to the clipboard.
-
Disables
drag and drop functionality
.
-
Disable keyboard shortcuts
(for example CTRL + C to copy)
.
-
They automatically modify the links of the images so that they cannot be copied.
-
JavaScript verification
(shows a warning if JavaScript is disabled)
.
As you can see, there are few protection options offered by this type of plugins, but ...
are they really effective?
DO NOT!
At the time of writing the article several ways to avoid these protections come to mind, for example:
-
Use some type of network sniffer
(WireShark, Fiddler, etc)
.
-
Linux terminal tools as basic as Wget or cURL are not limited by these plugins.
-
Even if the right mouse button and keyboard shortcuts are disabled, extensions such as FireBug or the developer console that incorporate most browsers can be opened.
Surely there are many more ways to skip the protection of these plugins, but these are enough to prove that they are totally useless and only damage our website by limiting accessibility and even hindering support tasks by your sysadmin.
In short, you should not use these content protection plugins because unfortunately they are of no use. If you want to protect your photos, adding a watermark is perhaps the most recommended, but we can get there.