Have you ever seen exact copies of your content on other sites with no link back to the original? If you have a blog with no more than 200 visits a day, your answer is most likely to be “yes” (or you just never noticed it).

Going after each thief demanding to remove the stolen content is both time-consuming and depressing. Why not try to force them to link back?

Tracer (tip credit to SEOmoz.org) is a free tool that inserts a short piece of code to your pages. If any part of your page is copied, it adds a link back to your site to the copied content. Of course, the link might be manually removed but most thieves never care to.

The installation is really quick:

1. Register
2. Get the script and put it sitewide before body tag
3. Test your script

You are done!

Now try it: copy anything from your page and paste it in MS Word. You should see a link back to your site after the copied extract.

Inside you will also get statistics on what has been copied from your site. The control panel interface leaves much to be desired and according to the owners might take long to update but it is free – so we love it!

Are there any other ways you use to protect your site from content thieves who never link back? Please share them!