Lots of websites copied my original content from my own website, what should I do?

[esiow2013]

1. Should I ask them to remove and replace the content with their unique and original content?

2. Should I ask them to link to the URL where the original content is located?

3. Should I use a tool to easily track these "copycat" sites and automatically add links from their site to my site?

Thanks in advance!

[vmialik]

Hi,

1. Yes you can contact the owner to ask for removal. It might or might not be worth your time.

2. You can do that too. Or actually the best way to do this proactively in the future, if you are using wordpress, is using RSS footer option or manually set this up that will display the original full link of the article, this way it is automatically there as the scrape your RSS feed. This would be my top pro-active suggestion.

3. You can do this manually with Google Webmaster Tools and/or Copyscape, or also you can set up Google Alerts for each most that you have done that will notify you when the content is scraped.

For detailed info how to do some of this see this article also make sure to read the comments they are informative as well: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/

As far as actively fighting this, many say, it is not worth it, as long as you take precautionary steps to make sure that you always outrank the scrapers, with methods such as the RSS footers for each article you publish.

Hope this helps!