When you are publishing content online, there is a chance that others can copy it and publish it on their website.
Many of them do this out of ignorance, but ultimately it’s you who has to pay the price.
- You will lose traffic and ranking.
Google is getting smarter in finding pages which are duplicating your content, but not every time.
Sometimes, when others copy stuff from your blog, their copied web page is ranking higher than your original content.
While I was working on my website to recover from Google Panda, I realized that post duplication was a major reason for my site’s penalty.
If your content is also being copied by others, this tutorial will educate you on how you can report such pages to Google.
Once you report these copied pages, Google will remove it from its web-index and your original ranking will be restored. If you are reporting content that’s on the BlogSpot/Blogger platform, Google will flat out delete this duplicate content.
In my experience, they take around 2-10 days to process your request.
(Note: While Google has the power to delete BlogSpot/Blogger blogs, for self-hosted WordPress blogs, you can only report to remove it from Google’s web search. To delete that blog completely, you need to send a DMCA notice to the web-host of that site.)
Find copied content from your blog:
There are many services like Grammarly and Copyscape which you can use to find copied content from your blog. Or you can simply pick up a line from your blog post and do a Google search with quotes around it.
Here’s an example:
Go into Google and search for (with quotes)-
- “Or you can simply pick up a line from your blog post and do a Google search with quotes around it”
Report copied content to Google:
So once you have identified your copied content, go to the Google DMCA page and select submit a legal request.
“Web Search” (or “Blogger” if appropriate).
In this case, I’m selecting “web-search” as an example because the content is copied by Bloggers on various platform like self hosted WordPress and a few forums.
Now, select the rest of the options as appropriate in your case.
On the next page select these options:
- Google Products: Blogger/BlogSpot
- Reason: I have found content that may violate my copyright.
- Copyright: Yes, I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
- Work in question: Other.
After selecting this, it will give you a link to “this form” which will take you to a page where you can report those pages from the BlogSpot blog that is copying your content.
Note: If the copying website is not BlogSpot, you should select “Web Search” as the first option.
Here are the direct links for the different forms:
- For BlogSpot blog copying your content: Use this form
- Other platform copying your content: Use this form
- WordPress.com blog copying your content: Use this form
- For LinkedIn: Use this link
Now fill out the form and report all of the links. You can use a single form to report multiple links.
Before submitting, re-check your request.
It may be a little time consuming to re-check everything, but this works the best. Within a couple of days you will get rid of all such copied content and you will get back all of your stolen traffic.
- If those blogs (auto-RSS content generated blogs) are using AdSense on their pages, follow this link and report it to the Google AdSense team for a violation of copyright. This will cost the spammer the use of their AdSense account.
So far, I have removed hundred of links in the last couple of days and I can see my lost traffic coming back to my blog (especially for those keywords which were stolen by such copy-paste bloggers).
Earlier, I never bothered about reporting such posts to Google, but now it’s always a good idea to report all such copied content to Google.
Do let us know if you are in the habit of reporting such copied content to Google in the comments below. How has it helped your traffic?
This is a useful post.How to react if my whole blog posts of 2 years are copied by someone to another blog as it is?First I complained to google giving few urls and google removed those posts.But there are over 300 posts copied by him and it is difficult to file complains for each post.Any direct method?
My Google page rank was 3 and recently it was dropped to 2.But today when I check the rank of copied blog,he has page rank 4.So I have received a penalty?
Pl advise me if there is a method to solve this….
@Amy
You have to manually report all the pages, or you can file a DMCA complaint against the site, where it’s hosted. Though, DMCA via hosting takes time, but it works…
thanks a lot for the reply.I will try a DMCA complaint
Just submitted the DMCA takedown request. Hope the infringing blog will be removed soon. Thanks a lot!
Hello Harsh,
Thanks for the nice post.
What if anyone has regenrated the content without any credits, can i file any complaint?
Thanks & Regards.
Thank you for a nice article Harsh.
But i have a silly doubt.
Will they charge any money for removing content from another blogspot blog/website ?
@Sampath This service is free…Follow the guide and that copied link will be removed ….
Thanks for the reply.This shows your interest in your readers.Thanks a lot.
sir, your reply matter for us , thanks for your all cooperation
nadafss
Thank you so much Harsh.
Almost out of 200 article 180 article is copied from my site and i am found all this from Copy Space Premium account.
Now i have to give some time to remove all. Thank you so much for this tutorial.
That’s like a lot and I believe most of time it’s BlogSpot blog who are new to Blogsphere copies such article.. You should actively report such pages or contact the owner to remove such content.
Wow! Awesome and very useful post. Well yes, it’s always a good idea to report copied content pages to Google and Google DMCA page is really a great resource to report copied content. Thanks Harsh for this excellent and easy to follow guide 🙂
I’ve been trying to report spam blogs on blogger to 5 days but had not been processed and blog posts that still exist
I want to ask, what the process takes up to weeks ?
thank you
I followed this method for a long time. But all my blog post copied “.blogger.com” sites. So Google deleted that post. However, last week i saw few my blog post copied self hosting sites. So how do i remove them? I reported it to the Google and they confirm they will remove the “allegedly infringing materiel with in next few hours”, how do i completely delete them. I think if i report it to the hosting company they will remove them, so how do i fill the DMCA report to the hosting company and how do i find which hosting service use this site.
Thanks and expect favorable reply!
This article helped me to took action against spammer.
@Chris Perera : I followed this tutorial to send DMCA take down notice to web hosting company of spam website.
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/06/sample-dmca-take-down-letter/id=4501/
what if the copied content is having any links back to my site ?
Also ,I have checked many duplicate content checking sites like copyscale , plagium.com there are not so effective . Tell me some good site to check the copied content.
@harsh, really the post will be helpful for new bloggers who has started new and writing good content
Great tutorial dude.
I will definitely try this out. My post on world cup last 2 months was stolen by somebody and lost lot of traffic big time.
I will start employing this tactic and see how it improves the traffic.
Harsh, I have been trying to keep my content original by all means. Before this, I was using cease and desist notice. But now, with this post, I will have more easy way to report lots of bloggers blogs eespecially in case, they stole content from my website.
Really love this manual.
Nice post. There is one more site which is Plagiasrism.pro through which you can find the duplicated of a particular URL as well as the some chosen text.
I’ve been doing this since the day i found a copy cat. Though it works in some cases, where DMCA will examine and inform the culprit via mail and completely remove the content is they don’t act upon it. But its a question asked by all, how vigilant can a blogger be when there are tons of articles circulating around the web. Its something unstoppable or unmanageable for a blogger to deal with such scale of content theft.
Definitely I have never been doing this reporting but now would surely like to gain all those keywords back which were stolen from my blog so as to get Panda effect inversed to them..
Let me tell you one thing. If you do this, then get ready to wait for as long as 2-3 months for their reply. I got their reply after 2 and a half month after I reported one blog.
One simple thing you can also do if it’s a blog hosted on wordpress.com or blogger.com, that you just report it as spam. It hardly takes 1-2 days to get a wordpress.com blog deleted if it is found to be breaking rules. Can’t comment on blogspot spam feature at the moment.
Harsh!Did you know that Internet is a sea?How many articles can you find and report them to Google?Did you know i have faced many problem regarding it!If you search the some words of your Article with Google you may found some websites copied your content.But Google doesn’t show all websites which copied your content.At the same time if you search another words in the same post,you may find additional and different blogs Copied your content.If the Copied Content blog has more traffic and better page rank than original content blog,definitely there is a BIG problem among search engines.Also remember Auto Blog Content may get Good Ranking,but it is not permanent.Some months even some days after whole Auto Blog URL indexed in the Search Engine may be destroyed.Do your DMCA until you can.After Just satisfy your Heart with We got Backlinks from there………Harsh i hope you know “Truth Alone Triumphs” !
Hi, Harsh, I just want to know that when someone share my blog’s content on social bookmarking sites(i.e. digg, redditt),my partial content appear there, will it create content duplicacy? and treat my original content as duplicate and low quality content,which degrade my blog’s ranking on search engines with panda effect.
Pls suggest in this regard.
@Hamarasathi
This used to be an issue in the past but now Google search algorithm have become smarter and this is no more an issue. Now when somebody shares your content on social media or bookmarking sites, it won’t be treated as duplicate content and in most of the cases it won’t rank out our original content.
Nice gulidlines…Hope that it will be useful to get your visitors back…
the post above is cool, but what if somebody who has copied is giving a link back to my page??
Anurag it’s good to get a backlink but not at the cost of traffic. What if that guy post is ranking better than you, in this case you are missing out traffic. The correct way is to take an excerpt and give credit link. Though it doesn’t mean one should start doing it completely for his blog.
Perfectly said Harsh.
For a link I won’t like to share my content which I spent hours to write. It also dilute the quality of our blog. Build links in a natural way and if our blog has nice information then offcourse it will be shared.