Five Ways to Protect Your Blog Content

If you read my last post, then you know that one of my favorite bloggers recently had her content compromised, and it has really turned me off of blogging for the last couple of days.  I decided to take the day off yesterday, and I used the time to ponder the future of my blog, to chat with Brian and several of my other lovely blogging friends about the situation, and to do a little bit of research on online content security.

I have really found my passion in blogging, and I really don't want to give it up, so I have decided to take several steps to help prevent – or at least deter – someone from disrupting my little space on the web, and most importantly, to give me a tiny sliver of peace of mind.  And don’t get me wrong, I know that bad people are going to do bad things no matter what, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to at least try to prevent them from doing it in the first place. 

O N E – Know which of your Photos are being Pinned

As most of you know, my blog is very personal – I blog about my life and the things I love, a lot of which centers around my family.  I don’t run a blog that I’m looking to sell one day, and I don’t run a blog where I use lots of stock photos or photos that would be acceptable to me if they were “stolen.”  I post many photos of my husband, myself, and our babies, and it is not ever acceptable for anyone to be pinning those or saving them for any reason. 

Enter my new favorite website:

http://pinterest.com/source/YOURWEBSITEHERE 

Just plug your blog URL in place of “YOURWEBSITEHERE” and you will then be directed to a webpage where you can see every single photo that has ever been pinned to Pinterest directly from your website and the users who have pinned them and the boards on which they have been pinned. 

To my horror, when I did it yesterday, there were 25 photos of Olivia that had been pinned by a variety of different people across a variety of different boards.  I’m sure they were all completely innocent as they were all pictures of her from her first birthday party (this post that’s still going viral) and they were all pinned to boards for birthday ideas and such, but still.  Do not pin pictures of my kids.  Just don’t.

So what’s a girl to do?  I tried removing one of the pictures from the original blog post to see if it also disappeared from Pinterest, but it didn’t.  And I knew that contacting each user individually and asking them to take them down was completely out of the question.  So I did a little bit of research and…

Enter my other new favorite website:

https://www.pinterest.com/about/copyright/dmca-pin/

This URL takes you directly to Pinterest’s Copyright Infringement Notification page where you can request that Pinterest take any unwanted pins down.  All you have to do is fill out your basic information including your blog URL and then you just add the URLs for each of the pins that you want taken down (you can do up to 100 in one request) and submit it. 

Well, I thought for sure that it would be days, maybe even weeks before I heard back from them, but nope, it was just three hours.  Three hours, people!  Within three hours the wonderful people at Pinterest had taken down every single pin that I had requested.  Believe me, I checked!  They were all gone.  Every single one.  Bravo, Pinterest, bravo.  Keep up the good work! 

Needless to say, I will be checking on my pins once a week from now on, and you should, too. 

T W O – Protect Your Photos

While you may be able to patrol people pinning your pictures, you can’t prevent them from saving them straight to their own computers and using them elsewhere on the web.  However, you can try to deter them by doing a couple of things:

1) Add watermarks to all of your photos.  Sigh.  This is not something that I ever wanted to have to do because a) it’s a lot of extra work, and b) it just doesn’t look pretty.  But when it boils down to the safety of my kids or the photos looking pretty, I think you know that I’ll probably go with the safety one. 

2) Disable right-click on your blog.  Yes, super annoying for the blog reader and from what I read, also somewhat unprofessional, but again, the safety of my kids trumps all of those other things. 

T H R E E – Know who is Following You

You should always always monitor your blog followers as well as your social media followers very closely.  I watch mine like a hawk. 

-Blog-

Ever notice how I have my blog followers from all channels (Google Friend Connect, Google+, and Bloglovin’) displayed in my sidebar?  Well, that’s so I can easily see when I get new followers.  Every time I see a new one, I immediately check out their profiles/blogs to make sure that they seem legit, and if anyone looks suspicious or gives me a bad feeling, I block them. 

As far as subscribers go, there’s really no way to know anything about them because all you can see is their email address.  This is the one thing that has always driven me crazy.

-Social Media-

Same goes for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other social media channels you use to promote your blog – I look at each and every person who follows me on every social media account and then decide if I want them following me or not.  If I get a bad vibe, I block them.  I can’t even tell you how many people I have blocked on Instagram.  There are definitely some weirdos out there.

Simply checking up on your visible followers doesn’t ensure that there are no creepers out there watching you, though.  If your accounts are public, anyone can look at your info and pictures at any time and you would never even know that they were watching.  The only way to guarantee that weirdos aren’t seeing your information is to make your social media accounts private.  However, the downside to making your accounts private is that it makes it a whole lot harder to get new followers, which is a bad thing if you’re trying to gain exposure. 

F O U R – Display a Copyright Notice

-Blog-

From what I’ve read, you technically don’t really have to do this as your blog content is protected already anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to remind everyone.  In light of recent events, I revamped my copyright notice this week and displayed it prominently in my sidebar so no one can miss it.  I’ve always had a copyright notice in my footer and I left that one there as well. 

From what I’ve read, a good copyright notice should have four elements:

1) The word “Copyright” or the copyright symbol.  You can create your own copyright symbol by typing the following in the html – ©

2) The years that your blog has been in existence

3) The name of the blog or blog author

4) And the phrase “all rights reserved”

Therefore, mine is: COPYRIGHT 2015-2016 LINDSAY’S SWEET WORLD ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

I also decided to take mine a step further and let people know that I do not want them pinning pictures of my children.  I welcome party décor, projects, and house tour pinning, but nobody has any business pinning pictures of my kids.  Just don’t. 

And finally, I added that legal action will be taken if any of this is breeched, because, by golly, it will.  Don’t be afraid to let people know exactly what’s going to happen if your content is compromised.

In addition to the copyright notice in my sidebar, I also added one to the top of that blog post that is still viral on Pinterest.  It’s the post that I spoke about above that has been viewed over 35,000 times.  You know, the one where people were pinning pictures of Olivia?  So I added a copyright notice to the top of the actual body of the post.  That’s right, right in the post itself.  Now, nobody has any excuses.

-Social Media-

As far as Instagram goes, I’m currently working on adding a copyright notice to my bio, but you only have a certain number of characters that you can use, so I’m trying to decide how to word it.

F I V E – Have Someone Monitor Your Content

In all of my research yesterday, I came across the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that was put in place and serves to protect online content.  If you register at www.dmca.com they will:

1) Monitor your content

2) Let you know if your content is plagiarized

3) Take down the plagiarized content (one free/year)

All of those services are free, but you can also pay $10/month for additional services and unlimited takedowns.

Once you register, they provide a protection badge that you can place on your website to let others know that you are protected, and when people click on the badge, it shows your DMCA certificate.  If you don’t pay, your certificate shows as “unverified” but that doesn’t really mean anything as they are still monitoring your content and alerting you of plagiarism and theft.

In Conclusion   

This may all seem a little overboard, and it may not be necessary for those of you out there who don't blog about your personal lives, but being the mommy blogger that I am, and in light of the recent events, these are the right moves for me at this time.  I just believe that you can never be too careful… especially when the smiling faces of your babies are out there for all to see. 

And I also know that creepers gon’ creep no matter what, but at least I have some peace of mind knowing that I’m doing everything that I can to deter them. 

Do you have any other ideas on how to protect your content?  If so, please share!  I would love to hear them!

*Linking up with A Liz Adventures and Carolina Charm for Five on Friday, A Little Bit of Everything for Friday Favorites, Living for Naptime for BFF Friday Link-up Party,  September Farm and The Farmer's Wife for Oh Hey, Friday, and Meet @ the Barre for Friday Favorites!