This is a guest post written by Anil Gupta owner of ScopeForMoney.com blog. If you like to write for Shoutmeloud, do read Shoutmeloud revenue sharing program.
Do you know there are some people who are copying content from your blog without your permission and publish that content on their websites and blogs for few bucks? Do you have any solution to this problem? In this post I’m going to discuss several aspects related to blog content copying.
Copying Article
SEO impact ?
Will your blog have any impact if someone copies your content?
Yes definitely, you are being put into the risk of losing your search engine rankings and page rank when people copy your blog content. In many cases, copied content from your blog will first get indexed into Google and in those cases your content becomes duplicate. So Google may lower your blog rankings or may even not include your content into its index. So you are not getting the credit for all the hard work you put in writing those valuable contents that are stolen by content thieves.
Find them:
How to find if someone is copying your blog content?
To find out if someone is copying content from your blog posts, copy one sentence or few words from any of your post and search it on Google with double quotes in place around that. Repeat this process 3-4 times for each of your latest 8-10 posts. And in case you see more than one results about from your own website, go through those results and see how they have copied your content, is it some part or copied all of your blog posts and also don’t forget to check whether they have given any credit to you for that content or not. When you run this process regularly, you may find some websites that have copied content from your blog quite often especially if you have a popular blog.
Stop Them:
How to stop people from copying your blog content?
Now it’s all about finding and implementing ways to save your blog from content thieves. Here is something that can be done:
- CopyScape Banner: Place a CopyScape Banner on your blog to give a warning message to people who want to steal your content.
- Contact Details: And in case you saw a website copying your blog content, you have to look for ways to contact the website owner. Please check the website home page and other important pages like About US, Contact Us, Author Page, Contact form etc from where you can actually interact with the person behind that website. And in case, you don’t get any contact information on that website pages, you can try using Whois and Alexa records to get contact details about that website. Once you have the contact details about that website, here are some steps that you can take to stop people from copying your blog content:
5 Steps to take down those Content Copy bloggers:
- Send Polite e-mail: First step that you can take is sending a polite email to the website owner informing that he had copied content from my website. Copying content is illegal and asks him to remove your copyrighted work. Wait for a response from website owner for the next 5-6 business days.
- Cease and Desist Notice: If nothing happens with your polite email, you can think of sending Cease and Desist (Also known as C&D) notice to the website owner. Here is a cease and desist sample that you can edit as per your requirement.
- DMCA Letter to webhost: Another thing that you can do is send a DMCA letter to the webhost of that website. As per law, webhosts are supposed to take strict actions against websites that copies copyrighted work from other websites.
- DMCA letter to Google Adsense: If the website that had copied content from your website is using Google Adsense can send a DMCA letter to Google Adsense. This is one of strong actions that you can take where the website owner can actually get banned from Google Adsense. In that case, all of his revenue coming through Google Adsense will be gone.
- DMCA letter to others: Apart from Google Adsense, you can send DMCA letters to other services from where this website is generating business
- Legal actions: If nothing works, you can think of filing a lawsuit.
I’m sure these tips will be very useful for many people who are facing issue from copy content thieves. What action will you take to prevent those copy content spammer?
Related posts:
- How to report blog posts copy spam to fight against plagiarism
- How to Deal with Blog Plagiarism
- How to fight back to content Theft (Plagiarism)
- Protect your blog post from copy Geeks
- Why People Blog?
- Want More Traffic? Write Compelling Content
- Use Google Alert to Monitor What People are talking about you Online
- Use robots.txt to protect your blog from duplicate content issue
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{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
Awesome tips dear… Will surely consider this if such case happens to me
Here are some more tips: http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/take-it-back-100-tips-to-defeat-content-thieves/
absolute beauty post as usual ! i have been searching for a link to be followed when someone copy the articles ! thanks again.
These are very effective tips. In my personal experience I noticed many bloggers doing thing. I don’t think anyone can make money from it. Google is smart enough to catch those freaks.
But what if anyone copies your entire blog (I experienced such things also). This is the thing anyone never tolerates. So the best way is:
1) To send a polite email.
2) DMCA Letter.
Nice one Anil.
On some occasion, you can get in this situation when someone publish your latest post and able to get it crawled prior to you, may be by submitting it some social bookmarking websites which are supposed to be one of the easiest and fastest way to index your content in Google and other search engines
First off, thank you for the link to my stock letters, I greatly appreciate it.
I also wanted to offer a suggestion. Though Google is fine for finding matching content, it isn’t very practical for blogs as there is so much content and it is constantly changing/being added to.
Instead, I recommend using FairShare (http://fairshare.cc) as it does a good job tracking blog content but with just a fraction of the effort. With it, you just provide the site your RSS feed and subscribe to the one they give you and you’ll be notified of any copies of your work that appear. It’s a free service.
Hope this helps some and thank you for the great article!
Well as far as the plagiarism is concerned Google have made it clear that one need not worry about it as long as it doesn’t rank better than the original content itself.
The worst thing that scares a copy-monkey is when you mail him and say that you are filing a DMCA complaint lol
Yes, you can even ask hosting company to block that account owner. Most hosting companies are very aggressive in removing copy cat blogs. So, its is not difficult but it is challenge.
I have so far get lots of success with cease and desist notice. Once I get such notice to a content stealer, he immediately removed my link or agreed to give link attribution for the content he used
I wonder if the Copyscape badge would be enough of a deterrent for a copy thief? Is anyone familiar with Tynt Insight? It is supposed to track what’s being copied from your site and add a link to your site when it has been pasted. I haven’t tried it myself, yet, but here’s a link if anyone is interested:
http://www.tynt.com/
Really superb……….. It will surely help us a lot !!!
Thanks again
Not agree with first point – SEO impact – IF you use canonical meta tag then copied content never indexed before your content. Remember one think your original content come first then copicat copied your content.. As per the canonical concept Google always crawl the fresh and genuine content first. if it found 2 same content on different site . it use time period means date of post publication.
I wanted to ask one thing , what to do when someone uses my background image ? Is it Legal ?
good job gupta, thank u for ur great article
Hey that’s something I would like to know about, thanks for this information.
But I have another question for you, what to do to counterfeit these warning
I’m not able to understand your question properly. Could you explain it in details?
My question is – what to do when someone send you such type legal notices and you haven’t did anything wrong or have done it unknowingly
In that case, you should talk to the person who sends you that notice. And ask him whether he want you to remove content from your website or will just be happy if you give credit to him for this content.
Copyscape badge is not going to make any impact on those crappy content stealers. But i am pretty happy with canonical tag concept. It really brings some relief when you are into these kind of situations
Well .nice post .
But the truth is ” copy-pasters can never be grown and can never make an identity ” .I want to give a message to those peoples who do this ” It is useless and if you want to be a successful blogger you must create your own “.
besides google is cleverer than anyone .
Hosting companies I think don’t block any website unless and until theres a legal document available to them.
Atul
Anil I want to ask a ugly question .
For a blogger “what is the proof if the article on his blog is original and have not been copied from anywhere .”
Now I explain my question .
Suppose You have written this post and someone copies it as such on his blog at the same time .And changes the time and date according to his need .
Now what is the proof rests .Can you tell me about this problem .
I think it all depends upon the the kind of profile your blog have. If you are a genuine blogger, you will never love to copy other’s work on your blog. And if you are a content stealer, you will be stealing it from lots of blog. With such blogs, most of content is copied from some top blogs in that niche. So by looking at that blog history, you can judge the content for the current post is created by that bloggger or copied it from somewhere else
I think nothing we can do except fighting back, i just considering about SERP when our content duplicated by some one and hi have better position in google, so i just try to get more backlink to my post until i have better from him.