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What To Do When Someone Copies Your Content/ Site |
When you find that parts of your Web site have been maliciously stolen by a competitor or a scammer, whether it be an article, images or even the whole design, it’s important to have the offending site remove the copied portions as soon as possible to make sure you get credit for your hard work and to maintain the credibility of your brand.
Gather Information and Proof
- Find a contact email address for the offending Web site. If you can’t find an email address on the site, do a WHOIS search for the registrant, this will be the owner of the Web site and should also list their contact information. Also, make a note of who is hosting the Web site.
- Use the Way Back Machine to find past views of your site — this helps prove that your site, with the original content, has been online longer.
- Provide a link to the Google Cache showing that the Google Spiders discovered your content earlier than the offending Web site.
- Take screenshots of the copied material on the offending Web site. In the case of a whole site being, copied save the source code as well so that it can be compared with yours.
- Gather as much date evidence as possible — this might include screenshots or copies of:
- The dates comments were made on your blog in response to the original post
- Your MySQL database records
- The original (preferably unedited) images or graphics with the file date
- Past backups of your Web site with dates modified
Before You Do Anything, Take Screenshots!
It’s natural to immediately want to contact the appropriate parties when your site gets copied, but pause for a moment, and be sure to first take screen grabs of the duplicates and if possible, use tools such as Wayback Machine to view the crawled pages at earlier dates.
Also, take screenshots of your own work as proof in case you need to update anything as you go through the next steps.
You’ll likely find that parts of the site that were copied need to be updated, changing the layout or copy. Doing this ensures you aren’t scrambling to revert pages to previous states.
Contact the offending Web site’s host to make a complaint, sending the Cease and Desist order along with the evidence. Most hosting companies are very strict on these matters and will usually suspend the site temporarily until matters are cleared up.
File a DMCA complaint with Google and the other search engines telling them to remove the site from their search indexes as the site involved violates copyright laws.
Other Solutions:
1. Contact the website owner to stop doing it in nice words via its contact us page. Or take his e-mail from Whois.
2. Contact the web hosting of the website owner. Some hosting has a zero-tolerance policy against copyright content.
A member of Bloggers Funda asked the following questions, and I answered:
1: How XYZ publish my every post at the same time?
Ans: RSS Feed or Sitemap
2: Does it effect on my site?
Ans: Yes, it does impact your site negatively.
3: Why does XYZ get better positions than ABC with copy content or low matrix?
Ans: His site may be faster than you, may have PBNs links that make better than you to rank higher. It may be better in other 198 factors like age.
4: What I do now my content doesn't auto post on XYZ?
Ans: Disable feed
5: What I do now
Ans: Report Google DMCA at