The Internet is an open platform, and it’s so easy to copy somebody post and paste it on your blog. In most of the cases, such copy-paste blogger doesn’t even realize legal complication of such issues.
And innocent bloggers like you and me, are the one who have to do various things to handle these people who copy our original content, which we have written after hours of work.
In this post I’m going to discuss several aspects related to blog content copying.
SEO impact of copying somebody content?
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 in 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 website, go through those results and see how they have copied your content, is it some part or copy 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.
You can also take advantage of these Plagiarism checker tools. This will help you to eradicate manual work, and quickly find blogs which are copying your original blog post.
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 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 s to get contact details from 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:
- Offer partial feed: Many people use the automated ways to directly publish your content from your blog feed. A good solution is to start offering partial feed.
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 web host: Another thing that you can do is send a DMCA letter to the web host of that website. As per law, web hosts 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 the strong actions that you can take where the website owner can 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.
Must read: How to report copied content to Google and remove it from Google Search
I’m sure these tips will be very useful for many people who are facing the issue from copy content thieves. Â
What action will you take to prevent those copy content spammer?
Thank you for this precious post I have a question too,what if I publish my own content I mean totally posts on another blog(my new blog the older one is deleted by me)is this dangerous for my new blog?
I agree with RAVIRAJ. Worth looking at canonical meta tag .
Thanks for the post
I have a blog in blogspot.com, mostly about android roms, smartphones. etc..
The blog has a directory for android roms and how-to/instructions written by me, the links are collected from internet, public links, so I don’t care if the copy the links, the problem is that they copy the entire post and paste in their blog without my permission, even without any source links to my original blog post, even the use short url to make money with the links, I have commented in their blog about the copy&paste and they just delete my comment
I will fill the form to take down those lazy-ass bloggers
Hi I like your life story.I created a new website stakeideas.com please help me how to improve my blog and also visitors too.I hope you will give reply.
Ive requested DMCA letter to Google Adsense, but still copied content is there on copy blog its now 1 week no response from google !
Hi Harsh
I have a question that if my article is index by the Google and then my content of that article copied by content thieves. Is it affect my blog or not?
it does affect. That is why you need to file a DMCA complaint.
@Harsh thanks for reply..
I have a question again
How to file a DCMA complaint?
Hey Rahul,
You can file complaint here:https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en#ts=1115655
Will google let the person know who filed the complaint?
Googlebot visits most sites every day. If it finds a copied version of something a week later on another site, it knows where the original appeared. Googlebot doesn’t get angry and penalize. It moves on. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
Hi, I have website for viral content, Can I use the content from other blogger giving the source link in my blog and giving credit to them ? I see many popular sites doing that such as huffingpost. Wating for answer
Hey Sarah,
It’s okay to use few lines from a post like quotes, facts, stats and citing the source and giving them credit. However, it is not advisable to use the complete blog post and using it on your blog. This is a copyright violation.Even if you have a viral content website, you can take inspiration from an article, and write your own post around it. Keep the originality of your content.
Thankyou so much, I will keep this in my mind. What if I share content from my friends website with mutual consent, giving credits. Is it okay?
Hey Sarah,
It depends. If you are copying the whole article, it still will be a copyright violation. However, if you are sharing some facts or stats or summary of some experiments done, it’ fine. You can do that by citing credits.
Thank you so much Harsh.
my all content are copied by someone….
and i contact him by his Facebook page…and i tell them that this is illegal and i going to filed a complaint…
after few days he deleted all content….
@Yugal
This one always works. Nobody wants to get into legal issues!
Hi,
what is about if someone is copying the ideas of the posts but he is just changing the text a bit to avoid copyscan?
I still have the right to contact google for my right?
@Stefno
In such cases, getting success is too less. IF they have copied images too, you can still win your DMCA appeal.
A blog is copying my posts. Whole post is framed as it is, 100 percent same. There is no contact detail like, contact us, owner info. Also comment section is closed. Is there any way to stop this person????
Hey Arvind,
Yes, you can file a complaint in Google. read complete post here: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-request-for-url-removal-of-copied-content-seo.html
Hi! What if you are doing a blog that contains information that is already out there in many blogs? I like to include this info to visitors as to why they need a specific product for their business (why have a vehicle wrap). you can word things differently but the information is basically the same.
Hi. Can you please tell me what is copyright? Do we have to register for it? or all the bloggers have it by default? If I did not reserve copyrights, then I can’t follow these procedure to make my contents removed from other site? Please assist me.
Thanks, Kiran
In most countries, when you create something like a blog, book, painting, music. artwork etc, you automatically own the copyright. While there is usually no need to register, there are some instances where this is advisable. E.g. if you write a book or movie screenplay, register a copy of it with your local Writers Guild – most countries have one.
In short, you do not need to register any copyright, but it always helps if you can prove you created something before someone else did. Your ISP and/or the Internet Archive may be able to help you prove that.
It will be nice if you can answer my question. Every post in my blog is copied to another site. Every day they publish new content that is actually from my blog, including post title, content, images. They remove all links to my content. More than 250 posts copied. It is affecting my site. traffic reduced by 50% within 3 months. So i think it has some effect on google ranking and google search.
I requested the site to remove the contents -no reply.
Then told them about DCMA complaint – no effect. Filed DCMA to Google. Got reply that it is not hosted on google server. It is on host gator. But the issue is they need written legal complaint mailed or faxed to them to american location. It was easy with google , but not with other hosting companies.
I consider it as severe plagiarism/violation from the site owner living in hyderabad. I got this info on whois.. What to do next. I am feeling really bad because hours of my work is simply stolen and credited by some one who has no regret in doing that.
This post is very nice since you can take appropriate action on those who copying your contents.
my entire blog is copied by some loosers, what can I do to get these blogs deleted. Please help me.
@Rahul
You can report those pages to Google. Here is the link to tutorial, which will help you to understand the whole process https://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-request-for-url-removal-of-copied-content-seo.html
I have already filed a dmca complaint to Google and i only mentioned 5-6 links to be removed. but these copy makers have copied my 250 posts (my entire blog) and its not possible for me to report each link to Google. So what should I do because my site traffic is reduced and these loosers are ranking higher than me sometimes in google serp.
I feel your pain. Someone has stolen about 350 posts from me and google expects me to file one at a time? This is ridiculous. This site now has so many ads that you can hardly access the page. They are making money off of my content. Most likely a lot more than I am.
Thanks for this informative article Anil. I now understood what to do when my content is copied!
Thanks a lot sir…
My website’s content getting copied by someone, but now i m following your steps to stop this. Now i m just waiting for his response to my mail .
Thanks
I tried to file a report to Google but I got scared at some point where they asked if you are sure it is a copyright issue. Can someone please try to explain the difference between Plagiarism and Copyright Violation.
I know what they mean literally but I’ve now read so many confusing articles and I need clarification.
Plagiarism is where you copy someone else’s work and pass it off as your own.
Copyright violation is where someone copies your work without your permission.
Same thing, both illegal.
I just found out that someone copied my post from the beginning and I wanted to react very bad until I found this post. I think its helpful I have to put the dmca and copyscape banner on my blog, period!
I have a blog and here I post my own article. But sometimes my articles is stolen by many persons. I get some knowledge about this.
Thanks
Reaz