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?
Thanks for this useful post. A copy-paste blogger had copied my 20 posts in diffferent blogs. I hope this method works.
Hi, Harsh, I want to know that will google give rank to a post if it is rewritten or copied from else. Which is done by tools like a content spinner?
Thanks Harsh , I was trying to fill the Google Webmaster Tool’s DMCA form, but I couldn’t figure it out. Your Post Helped me in Filling it correctly.
Thanks again.
Regards : Shantanu.
Hey Shantanu,
Glad I could help.
I did what you explain here (the google form was in french but it’s the same steps) the spam site that copied my content was removed from google within 2 hours, but my own url with the original content wasn’t back in google after 1 day, is there something I did wrong?
Hi Harsh,
I have been hit by google manual thin content penalty few months back and i am working on recovering from this.
I was checking duplicate content through copyscape and found that one of the competitors have stolen content from my home page and put it as it is around 150 words on their About Us page.On their About Us page they are showing that their site has been created on 2012 and then copied all my content from home page (2 paragraphs) as it is on their page.
Now their domain is older than mine but they have copied my content to update the page.How can i prove google that they copied my content.Like if a web page exist since 2012 and i wrote an article in 2015.Now in 2016 they update their page which was originally created in 2012 but copied my content through page created in 2015,then how can google verify that they copied my content.
Please guide me the procedure should i first contact the webmaster of that site to put down that content and then lodge DMCA complaint ( but how can i prove google that they copied my content on their old page).
Hey Hasaan,
You can still file a DMCA complaint and state that they have updated the page. They have their own ways to find out when was the page updated.
Thanks for information and tutorial, very helpful for me. Some article in my blog was copied by someone with small modification 🙁
Sorry may bad english 😀
“now that PageRank is no longer visible, this may stop all those emails from black-hat SEOs bargaining for links and endless comments full of link-spam.”– Very well said Hriday!
Once I search the title of an article I have written and published first at my website, at the search results are only the forums that posted my article (some by myself), and do not include the original source. What can I do, why google do not include the original source? Can I copyright dispute using the forms you mentioned?
My whole site was copied by someone. I did the same as you mentioned in the post. I just submitted 10 URL’s and as a result, google banned the whole site of the victim. And really, it was an amazing feel for me to defeat that become.
Thanku Harsh you don’t know how much this article is helpfull for me
Hey Raj,
Glad that you liked the article.
Harsh, someone had copied my posts to his blog. I asked him to remove. He removed it but now he has modified it slightly and posted it again. I dont know how to deal with. Please please help me.
Hello Harsh,
I have a few doubts here, it woulds be really helpful if you clarify them.
1. Suppose if someone copies my original content and modifies a few lines then will it be considered as copied content or not? For example: If my article is of 700 words and someone copies the same article word-to-word and adds few more lines like 20-30 more words, so will it be copied as a copied content?
2. If a complaint is filed under DMCA for a single post, then will google stop indexing for that post on the so called copied blog or will it just stop indexing the whole blog?
3. Does this have any effect on Google Adsense? Suppose if someone does not have an adsense account when he/she copied content from a blog but later when a complaint got filed against him and he/she removed the copied post, so after that can he/she apply for an adsense account? Will he face any problems in approval?
4. I had a few more doubts but i forgot them while typing(lmfao) :P….I’ll ask them later they strike back.
Thanks
Really Nice Article ,
Thanx for sharing such a nice article for beginners .
I need to clarify one doubt ..
How to find If any one copy my original on my website..
Is there any tool to get notification for any one copied my original content ??
Can you Clarify it !!!
Hey Anto,
You can use Grammarly, 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 ( “ Text here ” ) and find all copied content.
Thanks Harsh for this useful information. I faced one such situation and I successfully reported this to Google after reading this post. I requested that guy to remove such materials but he didn’t do and now I am waiting for Google to punish him. I thought Google will recognize my work and rank me again but it never happened on its own. Now, I have taken this action. So lets wait and see what Google does to prevent my work.
Hi Harsh, You told that we can find content by just typing few lines of post. But what if they have made some changes? Will google will detect it or can we complain it for duplication?
@Yash
If the text is modified; in that case Google won’t take an action.
I too doubt that google can do anything about that.That is something called spin article where article are rewritten with just different words to avoid penalty from google for duplicate content.
For example, I am an avid reader and follower of a certain blog. And then I discovered that someone is copying their blog posts. Do I have some kind of right to report this directly at DMCA out of concern? Or should it always be the actual blog owner who should make the report? Thanks.
@Lem
In most of the cases you have to be owner of official representative of the blog, else filing DMCA won’t work.
Hi Harsh,
first of all i am happy to see that i got mostly all knowledge about DMCA and all here in just single blog post, and you are right we need to take care of it because blog post are king and like a heart in human body.
Thanks 🙂
First of all thank you, Harsh, for writing this post. It will help us a lot as many bloggers and other webmasters are stilling our articles as soon as we publish it. This will help all the real content writers to secure their articles in legal ways. Hope This will be helping many readers as It helped me.
Thanks, Harsh.
I’ve recently get my own DMCA’s badge and I think this can give you a type of security and protection for your contents.
And as usual you share a great article Harsh. 🙂
Harsh bro, you have always been an inspiration to me, the article is awesome, gives me pretty much all the information I am in need of. I’m happy that I have subscribed to get more such useful stuff.This article helped me a lot 🙂