Stealing website content is no laughing matter – if your content is reproduced on other sites, not only are your competitors gaining from your work, but your site could be penalized by the search engines for duplicate content.

Here are ways that you can prevent people from stealing your content, and also ways to prosecute people who have stolen your content.

Step 1: Discourage People From Stealing Your Website Content

The best thing you can do to discourage people from stealing your content is to put a copyright notice on each page of your site. It could be something simple like “Copyright my Company, 2007” or it could be more complex, like “All content on this site is Copyrighted by My Company, 2007. You may not use, distribute, or reproduce anything from this website without written permission.”

Step Two: Detect People Who Have Stolen Your Content

The best way to find websites that are using content stolen from your site is CopyScape. Just enter your site url and it will show you sites that may have stolen text from your site. You may want to consider using their paid service CopySentry, which is a great help.

Step Three: Contact The Site Owner

Once you have found a site that has clearly stolen content from your site,. You can just contact the site owner. (You can get their contact details by going to http://www.whois.sc and entering in the domain). Politely inform them that you believe that their site is using your copyrighted content, and ask them to take it down from their site.

Step Four: Send Them A Formal Letter

If you can’t contact them directly, or they do not comply, you can send them a legal cease and desist letter. You can find a form letter you can use at http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/contract/cease.htm Include a print out of their website with your content highlighted so they know what content to remove from their site.

Step Five: Send Their Webhost A DMCA/Copyright Infringement Notice

If the offending website owner has not removed your copyrighted content after the period allowed in the letter, you can notify their webhost. Each web hosting company has a different procedure for copyright infringement claims – try to find out what their host’s policy is and follow it. (If you don’t know what their webhost provider is, you can find out via http://www.whois.sc)

Basically the way this works is that you notify the webhost that the domain in question is hosting content that infringes on your copyrights. The webhost will either remove the content, disable the domain’s hosting account, or demand that the site owner remove the content or justify their actions.

Step5b: You can also file notices with Google, Yahoo, and MSN requesting that they remove the site with your content from their indexes.

Step 6: Initiate Legal Proceedings

If for some reason filing a infringement notice with their webhost did not work, you have one option left – take the website owner to court. This can be very expensive and you may not want to proceed with this step. If you do decide to take the website owner to court, consult with a lawyer skilled in copyright issues first.

Conclusion:

Website copyright infringement / content stealing is a serious issue and you should fight it relentlessly. I have successful fought dozens on infringement cases, and I’ve never had to proceed past step 5a.

I have been seeing a lot of talk on blogs during this summertime talking about taking a vacation. I personally, speaking as an entrepreneur never take a vacation. If I were to take a “vacation” that would mean to me that I am vacating something. As in my life. And personally I like my life and sure as [explicit deleted] don’t want to leave it, or put it on hold for anything or any one. My business’ and the work I do there are part of my life. I have found that I am happy when I’m productive and productive when I am Happy. So why then, would I not ever want to be productive? So why not just live your life in a different location, rather than vacating it? That is of course unless you really don’t like your life. And if that is the case you need more help than getting away for a few weeks could ever do for you!

Although we are in the digital age and the extreme availability of audio and video downloads are abundant. The most successful and prosperous entrepreneurs are the biggest readers. Following are some of the best books to help you on your Journey to and through self employment.
1. Magic of Thinking Big- David Schwartz
2. Think and Grow Rich- Napoleon Hill
3. Master Key to Riches- Napoleon Hill
4. How to Win Friends and Influence People- Dale Carnegie
5. The Millionaire Next Door- Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko
6. How I raised My Self From Failure to Success in Selling- Frank Bettger
7. Rich Dad Poor Dad- Robert T. Kiyosaki
8. It’s Not About the Bike- Lance Armstrong
9. Eat That Frog- Brian Tracy
10. Bringing Out The Best In People- Alan Loy McGinnis
Please comment on other books you have found to help you along the way.

Supposedly, search engines ignore nofollow links. But do they really?

A couple months ago, Shard did a test to determine how Google treats nofollow links. The results of the test were interesting, but not quite 100% conclusive, since the search term used was a mis-spelling, which Google recognized and highlighted results for the correctly spelled word. (The test was done using “piderman 3″ which Google correctly recognized to be a misspelling of “Spiderman 3″. Google then displayed and highlighted results for Spiderman 3 in the searchresults.)

Plus, another test was done which indicated that only Yahoo and Ask pay attention to nofollow links. This test only measured the indexing power of nofollow links, though, not the ranking power. (Interestingly enough, I found a nofollow link that was returned using the Yahoo link: command the other day…)

My Test

So, I’ve decided to do our own test to add more data to the nofollow debate. I’m currently running a test to determine:

• Do Google/Yahoo/MSN follow and index pages from nofollow links?
• Do Google/Yahoo/MSN rank pages based on the anchor text of nofollow links?

Here’s How The Test Will Work:

I’ve chosen a keyword that returns no results on Yahoo, Google, and MSN. I’ve written a page on one of my sites that is not linked to, and does not include the keyword or any similar word. I’ve then linked to the page from several other sites using nofollow links.

Now we just have to wait and see what happens. When the results come in, I will post them here, so be sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

How cool is it that Noah and I are launching our blog on entrepreneurship on Independence Day? After all, one of the foundations of America is a capitalistic market – the freedom for anyone with resources and guts to succeed in business.

We want this blog to be a place where young (under 35) entrepreneurs can come and hang out, make connections, learn, and of course succeed. I said young, but if any of you old birds want to hang out here, we promise we won’t hurt you!

Here’s to your success!

~Adam