Many have stolen our content. Rewrite vs. DMCA content removal?

[joony]

Hello,

We own a medical tourism website and many other sites have stolen (copied and pasted) our content. Our content is more than 2 years old, so we thought we could rewrite the content -

but Which is a more wiser decision from you guys' experience?

1. Archive our current content at a different URL and upload a fresh content in the current URL
2. Claim our originality to Google and ask the stolen sites to remove our content.

Thank you and appreciate your time.

[LesleyPaone]

The issue is not claiming originality to Google if you file a DMCA request, it is getting it removed from the host. I personally would try to get it removed from the sites article by article and see how that works out. I would craft a letter and copy both the host and the email address you can find for the website on the same email. Then with each one see what happens. I think you will get a good number of them removed.

[CommT]

If your competitors have stolen your content and are profiting from it then do everything you can to get it removed! DMCA, write to the sites, write to the hosts.

Do NOT move the content to an archive URL before doing the DMCA or Google won't know that you originally created it. This happened to us - another mortgage broker stole some content from one of our main sales landing pages, we didn't notice until after redesigning our website, and of course our new urls had a later date stamp than the site that stole our content so our listings started to drop (whole site, not JUST the page that had been copied). We got the listings back within a month of filing the DMCA,  but still, it galls that our content may have persuaded customers to contact the other company! They should have been our customers!

By all means rewrite/refresh the content if its 2 years old, but do it as well as the DMCA.

Good luck with this - I feel your pain,

Amelia

[hammadrafique]

Simply file a DMCA complaint and their results from SERPS will be removed. It will not help you much if you ask them to add a credit link or something else.

Moreover, if there are just 2 to 3 scrapper sites then first ask them to remove your content from their sites, mostly wouldn't reply if they are earning much from that scrapped content. If they don't reply then file a DMCA complaint.

I think DMCA is the best option, I've seen ever.