How To: Add Copyright Notices To Your Blog

September 10th, 2007

This post is being written as part of Sarah’s How To Group Writing Project over at BlueJar.

If you run a WordPress blog, hopefully you have an RSS feed available to your readers. This offers a great service to your readers because it allows them to have a convenient and easy way to view your blog’s content without having to actually visit your website. Unfortunately though, having a feed also creates a very easy way for other sites to steal your content and republish it without your permission, without even providing a link to the original source.

As a result, it has become extremely important to place a copyright notice within each post that includes a link back to the author’s website.

In order to add anything to the footer of your blog’s feed, you’ll first need to grab a WordPress plugin that will allow you to place things in your feed’s footer.

Currently there are 4 plugins that I know of that will help you accomplish this. They are:

This will allow you to basically place whatever you want in the footer. Once the plugin of your choice is installed, all you need is some minimal coding knowledge. Here is the copyright code you will want to use along with a link to your blog (add your site URL/site name):

When your feed is scraped, the footer will go along with it, causing a link to your site to show up on the thief’s feed. This will help discourage people who intend to steal your content.

Once you’ve got your copyright in place and working how you want, you get the added bonus of being able to add additional things to your feeds footer. Popular things to add are advertisements, affiliate links, or even links to certain posts you want to draw extra attention to.

As a little bonus content, if you haven’t already, you might want to verify that you have a copyright notice on your blog somewhere as well (usually in the footer). You can use this code to have the year automatically update:

Any questions? Feel free to let me know in the comments below!

JoLynn Braley says:

Hi, it sounds like you’re saying that Feed Footer is the plugin that allows you to put ads in your feeds, or do all 4 of them work like this?

I’m currently using Taranga’s Feed Copywriter, but it doesn’t help with the ad rotation. Thanks for that info!

September 10th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

GnomeyNewt says:

Thank you for your entry in my group writing project. I didn’t realize there were so many plugins for rss feeds. I’m going to have to check them out, the one I’m using seems really outdated!

September 10th, 2007 at 6:16 pm

Kyle Eslick says:

JoLynn – In my post, I was actually talking about the footer area of the feed when I said Feed Footer, but there is a plugin (#1) that is actually called Feed Footer. Sorry for the confusion!

Here is a post I did about the Feed Footer plugin if you are interested.

It rotates up to 10 different footers. I’m not sure if you can place actual advertisements, although I know you could sell text link advertisements, as well as link to your posts you want to feature and place whatever you want there (using HTML).

GnomeyNewt – Glad to contribute a post to your project! I think there are probably more, but that was the few off the top of my head. I tried a few before decided Feed Footer fit my needs.

September 10th, 2007 at 8:38 pm

Mark says:

Very cool, Kyle. Not too long ago I decided against using copyrights in my stuff, but since you’ve explained it this way, I think I’m going to change my mind.

September 10th, 2007 at 10:38 pm

Mark – Some of the other stuff is fluff, but I do believe the copyright notice is important.

September 11th, 2007 at 10:57 am

John Bennett says:

I’m going to have to look into these. I haven’t added anything like this to my blog yet, but probably will very soon.

September 17th, 2007 at 10:57 am

John – Love your site’s theme. Did you do that yourself? I would definitely get a copyright notice slapped on that puppy asap!

September 17th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

pelf says:

I use “Sig 2 Feed” and I love it!

September 19th, 2007 at 3:43 am

Dee says:

Very much appreciated. I had been wondering how to do that!

September 19th, 2007 at 6:51 am

Pelf – I like Sig 2 Feed also, but I like how Feed Footer randomizes what is displayed, and lets you get up to 10 different footers for your feeds.

Sig 2 Feed definitely gets the job done though!

September 19th, 2007 at 7:57 am

descargar ares gratis says:

hey, its a good idea to make your site copyright, cause all the content stealers are very high in this times, and you can get duplicate content! But if they do that, with this plugin you get a backlink.. really nice!

September 19th, 2007 at 9:03 pm

MDB says:

OMG! More stuff to add to my to do list! Like the way you suggest doing it, will check out the plugins.

September 20th, 2007 at 7:44 am

Descargar – You got it! The backlink obviously gives you a link, but it also lets you know that its happening because you’ll see the link in your WordPress dashboard.

MDB – Glad you found this post useful!

September 20th, 2007 at 8:02 am