Here is an almost too obvious idea... which I'm confident my fellow HNers will debunk in minutes!<p>Why doesn't Google allow, indeed encourage, a pre-publication process? As I see it, this registration would allow me to "predict" that my 5000-word essay, which can't be found anywhere on the Internet right now, will appear on example.com/article within a day. Almost beyond any reasonable doubt that should bring lots of credibility to my allowed site(s) and accurately destroy the credibility of unscrupulous sites that simply copy and paste. By the way, this could also apply to works placed in the public domain [1], and copyrighted material that will not (or should not) appear freely on the web, as is the case with the OP's book.<p>A refined API would speed up the process and allow authors to attach copyright restrictions to the resource in question. Needless to say, this process could be extended to other search engines, but it's safe to say right now that if Google alone allowed something like this it could rectify many problems in SEO.<p>I guess pre-registering heavy data such as images or video may not be reasonable yet, but plain text (even excluding HTML and CSS) could be a great beginning.<p>Thoughts?<p>[1] Even if a work is placed in the public domain, it would be reasonable to give the author's original version due prominence in the search results.