Reprint articles are a great way of promoting your websites as well as garner some good quality inbound links. We all know the three ‘biggie’ search engines value those inbounds.

Not only are reprint articles a great way of creating value for your website, they also give value to those who use them on their websites to build content. More quality content = a happy goog. And the people that especially seem to like using reprint articles in mass quantities are those who slap adsense beside those articles. You know - make some moolah off the free content.

It’s a win - win for both parties.

Well I’ve come across a few comments lately (forum posts, newsletters) that suggest using the nofollow tag on the links within the articles. Why? Well to hog the PR for the site hosting the articles.

I’m not trying to offend anyone, but c’mon now. Someone wants to build up masses of adsense cheese pages, and yet not allow the websites that are *giving* them free content any type of benefit in return for the search engines?

Here’s a thought or two on combatting that and protecting your work (your articles).

Copyright the article (as usual)

Add a Terms of Use clause:

This article may be freely distributed on the condition that all hyperlinks and anchor text are kept active and not altered in any way (including cloaking links or adding the nofollow tag). Anyone using this article that alters the content or hyperlinks agrees to pay the copyright holder $100 for use.

And then follow up on that. It’s easy enough to find out who is using your articles, so do periodic spot checks. If you find anyone altering the hyperlinks with a nofollow tag or cloaked links - send them a bill for $100 bucks :wink:. If there’s no contact form or response - contact the webhost informing them of the copyright terms violation.

Sending a DMCA notice can shake things up nicely with most hosts. Note: You must have a legitimate concern that someone is violating your copyright to file a DMCA - that’s why you need to include the terms of use on each article.

Another method I’ve noticed is a terms clause stating that permission must be asked first before using the article. You can then control who is using your articles and filter out the PR Hogs that way.

I wonder how long those using automated RSS to Blogs software are able to fly below the radar when they be busting explicit Terms of Use all over da place.

Although the above are just suggestions, I think the more article writers that put some form of Terms of Use in place forbidding the use of cloaked links and nofollow tags - these reprint article pirates will have to think twice before misbehaving.