What do I do about sites that copy my content?

[JohnPeters]

I've noticed that there are a number of websites that are copying my content.

They are putting the full article on their site, mentioning that it was reposted from my site, but contains no links to me.

How should I approach this? What are my rights and should I ask them to remove it or add a link?

Will the duplicate content affect me?

[AlanBleiweiss]

John,

Copying content is a frequent reality of the web.  Several things need to be considered when deciding whether anything should be done about it.

When you perform a search for the title of a page in question, does their content show up above yours or near yours in organic search results?

Are the sites copying the content competitors of yours?

If either of those is a "yes", and your content is actually unique and yours, you can file a take-down request with Google.

You should also contact the site owners and instruct them to remove the content in accordance with the DMCA if you're in the U.S. and If their contact information is available.  If it's not readily available on their site and you can't find them on Twitter or LinkedIn, you can do a Whois search on the domain name to see if there is contact info and it's not set to private registration.

You can even contact their hosting provider.

I also recommend you implement Google's authorship markup on your content as it is posted, to help Google understand you are the original author.  Though this does not guarantee theft of content.

Ultimately, if it's spammers and they're not ranking for anything you care about in direct competition with your content, as long as you have the authorship markup in place, there's not much you can do about it beyond what I've described.

[JohnPeters]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your reply, I do have the rel:author set up on my site.

I have just checked the copy site page and they have replaced it with their own author tag and they have rel='canonical' set to their page.

The page copy has the same URL and the full content copied.

Their site has the full contact details, so I guess I will contact them.

What in your opinion should I ask for? The removal? A link to my site? Allow them to only use a excerpt from my site?

[AlanBleiweiss]

are they a competitor?  If they replaced all the legitimate signals with their own, it's much more likely to be a spam site, or a dirty-tricks competitor or just a dirty-tricks site in general.  In that case, I'd demand removal under DMCA and filing with Google for a removal from the Google index.