Website copied, content stolen

[commodore64]

Hello everyone, just wanted to remind everyone about a great website to check to make sure no one is stealing your content from your website. Go to www.copyscape.com , and no I do not work for them, nor am I an affiliate of them. For free you can check up to three URLs from your site before paying for their service. We found a website a few years ago that was an exact copy and paste of our site, and then today I thought I would check copyscape again just for the heck of it. There were two other computer repair companies that had ripped off content and pictures from our website! Without copyscape, I would've never known, and now we can contact those responsible to have them remove our stolen content. I know if the content is not removed, you can report them to Google and to the DMCA. Hope this is helpful, and hopefully no one finds any of their content stolen!

 

[Rosco]

been mentioned on here before but a nice reminder for the new people.... thanks for sharing!

 

[Vicenarian]

Out of curiosity, I ran a search on one of my blog posts, and I found a dude in Nigeria had copied considerable amounts of my content on his computer services website. Not sure if I'll send a cease and desist email though, as I'm not sure what legal/etc. power I'd have in Nigeria anyway...

 

[Mr.Mike]

Thanks for that. Always good to be reminded!

 

[16k_zx81]

Yeah I run a plagiarism scan every couple of months. Last count one of my blog posts had been syndicated 47 times!

A reminder that plagiarism is not just annoying - it will actually damage your SEO - your pages need to be mostly unique content. If they are replicated in other locations then rank can be diminished because of this.

In other words, plagiarism can cost a lot of money in lost business due to its negative effect on your SERP.

Copyscape premium is only 5c per search and provides more than the free version. Definitely worth the investment IMO. (note: no affiliate link, just stating an opinion)

 

[lsi]

I'm still dealing with this issue from last week when I found 4 sites. DMCA takedown notice has worked on 3 of them. Luckily they are all in the US. One site in CA is not responding so I am going to have to contact a lawyer and see what my options are and what is worth me pursuing.

Just a note- I couldn't find any way to request the google content to be removed. This is all I could find from google:

"Google is a provider of information, not a mediator. We bring you different webpages that relate to your search request, but we don't make any claims about the content of these pages. For more information, please see our Terms of Service. In matters involving trademark, it is best to directly address the webmaster of the page in question. Once the webmaster has altered the page in question, Google's search results will automatically reflect this change after we crawl the site."

 

[commodore64]

You can report to google here
http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs

 

[lsi]

that's where i tried to report it

 

[Paul Rodgers]

I'm still dealing with this issue from last week when I found 4 sites. DMCA takedown notice has worked on 3 of them. Luckily they are all in the US. One site in CA is not responding so I am going to have to contact a lawyer and see what my options are and what is worth me pursuing.

Send a notice to their host along with a copy of the notice you sent to them. The host has to comply to maintain safe harbor status and they will not be willing to jeopardize that. They may give the site owner 24/48 hours to take the material down, but if it doesn't happen they will take the site down themselves.

Do not contact a lawyer for something that you can easily do yourself.

 

[PBComputer]

Copyscape premium is only 5c per search and provides more than the free version. Definitely worth the investment IMO. (note: no affiliate link, just stating an opinion)

I have just signed up for copyscape and it has just paid for it's in the first new searches, found two firms, one local and another in Preston who have copied my content.

If you have not run copyscape I recommend you check your site.

 

[SupportCover.com]

Highly recommended and worth paying for, we found that someone had stolen our content word for word (even forgetting to remove our company name ) - as someone said it's damaging for SEO too!

 

[PCSupportGlasgow]

we normally get copied every few months by same guy in San Francisco, CA 94134.

Dont know how many websites from same person we have had taken down but the brain dead fecker just moves onto another free host and puts our content back up again.



on another note we have a company near us who suddenly started using exact same marketing campaign as we have been using heavily for couple of years but has changed words just enough that copyscape counts it as new content.