Stolen CONTENT?

[marker-311528]

This post is deleted!

[RyanKent]

Hi Mark.

Stolen content is definitely an issue many site owners face. For maximum protection, you can copyright your web pages.

There are several sites which offer copyright searches. One example is: http://www.copyscape.com/

The bottom line, since your content is viewable in a web browser, there is nothing you can do to prevent it from being stolen. What you can do is use badges to help ensure thieves are clearly aware your work is protected and you intend to aggressively protect your work.

After that, your steps are notifying the offending site / host / Google of the theft. After that point, legal action is required.

[Mattbyo]

Mark,

Having worked with several companies whom posted vast amounts of technical / original copy, unfortunately, your going to run into people stealing it.  One company known for helping control such issues is called Copyscape (www.copyscape.com), your can visit their website and see if their products fit your needs.

On several occasions I have written the company which has duplicated / stole our copy and suggested them add a do follow link with anchor text of our selection back to our website and mentioning our website as the source of the original article -- this has worked (a bit) for more technical papers.

If you do not want to do that then contact the company via their website or via their webmaster (by doing a whois on the domain name) and ask them to remove their version noting copyright infringement.  While none of these tactics will always work its worth a try.

Just always remember you get more with sugar than vinegar.

[Gyi]

Hi Mark,

Yeah, that can be annoying. You might want to check out http://copyscape.com/.

You should also consider contacting the webmaster about ceasing and desisting and if that doesn't work, perhaps a DMCA take down: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905

[ResslerMotors]

Duplicate content can be stressful, especially when you first start looking at your websites metrics.  However, there are only a few cases where you should be really concerned.

1. When you search specifically for a line in the article, who pops up first?

2. Who has a more authoritative website?

3. Who's generating more links with the content?

4. Have you emailed the webmasters of the websites?

If it were happening to me I would see which domain google is treating as more of an authority (Who pops up first when searching specifically for the article).  If I was first I wouldn't worry too much about it at the moment.

If I wasn't, then I would email the webmaster asking for a recognition within the post that I was the original poster.  I would then look at their link metrics and try to see if I could convince any of those people to link to me as well/instead.  Those two things will help reestablish the authority balance (if you are convincing).

The third option would be to email the webmasters and ask them to take down your article, but that wouldn't help the future of your website.

[AlanMosley]

Use canonical tags in all your pages, you are telling the SE that it is your content you have a good chance that search engines will give you the original content credit if they pick yours up first, and if somone steals your content, there is a good change they will take your canonical tag with it pointing back to your site