If other people copy your content, is really GOOD or BAD for SEO ?

[NachoRetta]

Hi MOZ friends.

Last week, when i was following up the backlinks linking to my domain, i detect that a new website from an unknown administrator copies the content of an entire section of my website.

The administrator of that webpage did not remove the internal links on the post, so i could find.
My website has a better domain and page authority and we focus every day on create new content, but when we found people that only copy content from another, i feel disappointed.

But then I got to thinking that could be good that people copy our content, although they did not quote us. If they do not remove the links either by mistake or on purpose, we receive new backlinks.

¿What do you think about this? ¿Is really good that a website copy our content?

If they remove all backlinks, Is risky that Google detects that the content owner is another?

¿What do you do in this cases?

[Lumina]

Never allow someone to take or steal your content. Ever. It's never good for your site, and it's just a matter of time before it causes an (even bigger) issue for you. Duplicate content hurts both parties, even if you added it first. Moreover, the backlinks wouldn't be worth the harm.

Send them a take-down request to their website administrator. If, after a short amount of time, they haven't responded and/or taken your content down, file a complaint with Google regarding stolen content.

[MarketingChimp10]

Hello Juan,

This is bad. Although you are getting link juice from this source, it's still plagiarism. You need to contact Google or notify the violators to take down that page. My recommendation is to collect evidence using screen shots, document or files. Reach out to them, and let them know that they are in violation of copyright infringement. If they ignore your request, file a DMCA Complaint with Google. Here is a link from Kissmetrics that will guide you in filing a DMCA Complaint. Also, some additional info on safeguarding your content. I hope this helps!

B/R

Will

[donford]

HI Juan,

It's a bad thing. Will's and Bryan's responses are great.

My personal experience provides another side to this. Years ago I ran an ecommerce site in a smaller market. Business was good, and then I started getting these random emails about orders that I could not find any record of. I spent literally hours going through documents and the database trying to figure out what was going on and came to the conclusion I was getting trolled. But these people were insistent they just wouldn't let up, I was stealing from them and they were threatening me with lawsuits and what not.

About a month after this started I found the problem, 2 copy cat websites had popped up and copied some of my content word for word, markup for markup, resulting in pages on their site with links to "my contact page". Turns out the people did have an order they were just complaining to the wrong company. Though I did convert a couple of these people into customers, the time I spent looking up erroneous orders and responding to emails made it a bad experience.

My thoughts,

Don