Getting Duplicated Content Removed

[Gerad]

So I recently took over an in-house SEO role and began some house cleaning. I found a few places that had copied or duplicated our homepage content. Naturally I reached out to them to ask them to remove or change the content. Today I come to the office and one of the sites I had requested to remove the content, had fired back at me that I was being rude, threatening and I should go f**k myself. As if this wasn't enough this guys was an upper level manager (managing director) and knows the upper management where I work. Now I have people in my company pissed at me, when I thought I was doing the right thing. Am I in the wrong or what? I had simply asked to remove or change the content and that failure to do so could result in legal action. I understand that it could have been misconstrued as a threat (which it wasn't intended to be) but its seems like a pretty immature response from a higher level person. Any thoughts or advice on what to do next?

[AlanBleiweiss]

People in power like to throw that power around, both to prove to others that they have it, and to remind themselves that they're so amazing.

Since you're the new guy, and have yet to prove your worth, my best suggestion, both from an SEO perspective as well as a life-lesson and general business perspective would be to let the subject drop for the time being.  If it's just content on the home page and not the entire site, given the politics of it all, you're probably better off focusing on other tasks so that you can build your worth to management over time.

Maybe one day you'll be able to revisit the concept of why duplicate content is bad for the company, maybe you won't.

[GeorgeDavis]

Consider if the duplicate content is really enough to make a fuss over, if it is, go to the people he knows and explain to them what they are doing and how it is hurting your bottom line (try to put it into dollar amounts with data).

Money talks, often companies are willing to cooperate and help each other until they understand the dollar amounts involved.

[EGOL]

It is a  very small world in a lot of business niches.  Always assume that your boss knows your competitor.

Also, unless you are the owner of the company you should never make a threat or send a nasty email to anyone.  Tell your boss about the problem and let him/her do that dirty work.  That's what bosses are for (I am a boss so I can say that with confidence.)

Nevertheless... if this person is getting away with using your homepage content he might also be using your product page content, images and who knows what else.

I would be on the lookout for other infringements and if I found them I would (in this instance) gently inform my boss about duplicate content problems that might arise and losses in your corporate advantage related to infringement.

Be ready to give a very short and very convincing statement about why this is an important issue.  You have seen how they behaved in this situation.  There could be strong relationships between the companies and your company could be on the advantageous side of them.

Good luck.  Be careful.