To Hide or Not to Hide?

How open should the content on your site be?

When we’re discussing requirements with clients—the type of content, article length, frequency, and so on—the conversation sometimes ranges widely. We might wind up talking about the history of the business, or the contact’s personal interest in sports or music, or what one of us did on our most recent vacation. That’s perfectly normal, and if that didn’t happen now and then we’d start to have concerns about how well the relationship was developing.

But tangential technical questions come up, too, as do things in areas that might be better labelled as “concerns.” One of these that’s arisen enough times to be worth mentioning is a question similar to this:

“We’re paying you for this content. Shouldn’t we be restricting access to it?”

This might seem like an obvious question, even possibly a question that’s “too obvious” to ask. It’s not, though, which is why we’re talking about it in this installment.

The general concern is this: The owner of a web site is taking the trouble to generate high-quality, original content. That content costs some amount of time and money to produce. Posting it makes it publicly available—anyone can read it. Anyone can also copy it and reuse it…or steal it. That’s content that the site owner has made an investment in.

Everything in the previous paragraph is true. But the most important part is the last sentence: That’s content that the site owner has made an investment in.

That investment is what matters. That investment was made to display the business’ expertise. It was made to develop a content library (or portfolio) over time. It was made to help drive relevant search results traffic toward the site, and to present potential clients with a favorable impression of the business.

If your greatest worry is that content will be stolen, you’re looking at the problem in the wrong way. While it’s true that this content is meant to be effective and useful for a long time, it’s also true that you should look at the investment in this content the same way you would in a more traditional method of informing customers about your business: a newspaper ad, a television or radio commercial, a billboard. You wouldn’t buy a billboard and then worry that if someone sees it that their eyes will steal an image that you’ve paid for. Online content, for the most part, needs to be treated similarly.

If that content is locked away behind a sign-in screen, or flagged to discourage search engine indexing, it’s not performing the functions it was created for. Users need to be able to find the content when they go looking for it, and for a user to be able to find that content it needs to be visible to search engines. If something is standing in the way of that, it’s probably undermining your investment more than the risk of someone copying your content.

We understand that some businesses have an uneasiness about putting their content on public display. For some clients, there are things they don’t want to display: things that might qualify as trade secrets or proprietary information that keeps them ahead of their competitors. Some businesses also offer special information as a premium to their clients: they only get access to it once they subscribe or invest, for example.

These are legitimate exceptions to the practice of keeping blog-type content freely available. As a rule, however, information that isn’t proprietary, or confidential, or otherwise exceptional, should be posted where it can be found.

This explanation and argument isn’t going to win everyone over, and some readers will—rightly so—follow up with questions about copyright, or about needing a way to make sure their content doesn’t show up somewhere else. These are good questions, and it’s correct to ask about them—because there are solutions to these concerns.

While we encourage our clients to share as much of their content as possible, we also encourage them to keep an eye out for content copiers, and to take steps to thwart them. This involves some planning and some investment of time (and usually other resources). A business should take steps proactively to find out who is copying their content—and what they’re doing with it. We’ll talk about issues of copyright (what it is, what it means, how to use it, how it can—and can’t—protect your content) and some simple ways to keep a handle on the dissemination of your content in future posts.

To put your business expertise on display online, get in touch with Waltham WordWorks to learn how we can help you affordably showcase your business or industry knowledge and use it to attract new clients.