How worth it is it to pursue websites who steal your content via cease/desist or DMCA takedown?

[sftravel]

We publish popular general interest content.  Using a commercial scanning service, we've found our copied content in many places.

Is there an SEO value in getting copied content removed from websites who infringe / copy our content?  It is a time consuming process and many infringements.

And.... what if they copy the content, but include original links to our site in the content.  Ironically, this is actually generating links for us - does this affect the answer?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Not worth tracking it down and enforcing because google knows its duplicate content and if it is your oriiginal content then they know you created it first. KUDOS to you.

This is like selling life insurance and they are trying to scare you that you are going to die.......Here is a company that is promoting a service to track down the copy....notice how they never talk about how it will hurt your seo....they just make the blanket statement that you should enforce it and the steps you should take......if it isn't effecting your SEO value then stay away....

http://www.yourseotoday.com/blog/bid/84012/Don-t-Let-Your-Copy-Get-Copied

Don't waste your time if it isn't effecting your seo. If you are getting back links then ride the wave....more link juice for you.

Hope this helps create some clarity.

[AndyMacLean]

Make sure in your rss feeds you have your link/anchor text back to your site. That anyone copying your feeds is inadvertently giving you a link to the original source.

[Boodreaux]

Wow!  That is cool.  I already have about 50 other sites taking my data and re-posting it on their sites.......as soon as I put up an rss feed in the next couple months I will do this...sounds like great advice!

[Dr-Pete]

I'd generally agree - it's usually not going to be worth the time/effort/money, AND the links could actually be helping you. One caveat, though - IF a scraper is outranking you (and it does happen), that's a much different story. The low-quality copies will just get filtered out, but I'd definitely monitor your ranking for new stories and make sure someone else isn't using your content to beat you on your own search terms. That's a much different situation.