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Content thieves “make money online” off your content. This car could be yours instead.
Recently two of my blogging friends were struck by bold content thieves. I do not speak of automatic content scrapers who also are a pain in the back of my SEO 2.0 blog but lowly and greedy copy cats who only manage to find out which posts are very popular on social media and to copy and paste them in their entirety to their blogs.
You must fight content thieves at least to prevent Google to drop you assuming that you are the duplicate content.
Maybe some automation is used in these cases too but I’m sure there is some human behind it who will notice if you get angry.
Of course getting angry is not enough, you got to strike back to make them feel the pain they inflicted on you.
Lawyers and police do not help much on the Internet. The web on the other hand, especially of the 2.0 kind has plenty of self-healing aspects which are very supportive in these cases.
So here I present to you 10 ways to fight back content thieves:
- Comment if possible, make ‘em feel you know about them
- Tell everybody and expose the content thieves publicly by just writing “The x blog is a content thief”.
- Contact their blog hosting service: wordpress.com e.g. is very quick and supportive Lid of Blog Well told me.
- Contact their ISP. Run a who is search and report the content thief to the ISP they use. Unless they have a server in the basement, it breaks the TOS.
- Contact their advertisers, Content thieves want to “make money online” by cheating so fight them where it hurts most. Again, most advertisers do not allow content theft.
- Use social media like StumbleUpon to give them a bad review and add the original source where-ever they have been submitted instead of you. Also contact the social site admins to remove the copy and take the original URL of yours.
- File a Google spam report.
- Find other bloggers whose content has been stolen and act together.
- Take some content from the site that took yours. If they think they can steal from others, why not taking theirs too? Guess where I got the pic above ;-)
- Write a post making others aware of the ways to fight back content theft
Do not provide additional publicity for the thieves, as they do not care how they get traffic or links, they only care that they do. Do not link them, not even using nofollow as people will still click the links.
Precaution is the best way to deal with content theft, there are few easy measures that will at least make the content theft a two edged sword:
- Add internal links to older blog posts to your list posts, thieves are lazy and will not in most cases edit #21, #37 and #54 of your list.
- Write from a personal point of view, “my friends a, b, c think” and link your blogging peers. These friends will also notice that they just got befriended by a content thief and at least alert you.
- Mention your name or your blog in the post.
These methods do not make the content thievery go away but you aren’t and you do not feel powerless in such cases.
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This is a good tool to investigate if anybody’s pinched your content:
http://copyscape.com
Good article Tad and a poignant issue for all bloggers. I’m with you on most points aside from stealing content back from thiefs. Do two wrongs make a right?
Good ideas. Although I do agree with James above.
One other tactic is to blog about the theft and optimize your post for their company. That way it will show up in the search results for someone doing research on their company. I did this for one firm recently http://b2b-seo.com/index.php/the-wisdom-of-thieves/. For a long time the posting regarding the theft showed up in the top 10 Google results for their firm. Currently, it’s ranked about #15.
Thanks Highena: This is indeed a must know link.
James: You are right I guess, but I wanted to add some controversy to the post ;-)
Galen: Exactly, I really forgot to mention it (as a SEO I often take such things for granted).
First off, thank you for bringing attention to this topic and working to help others with this problem. I am very glad to see this issue get the attention it needs.
Second, I do have a few thoughts on the post and some ideas that might help further.
For one, your advice on “tell everyone” and “don’t promote” seem somewhat conflicting. I agree with the latter, that you should never promote the spammers and scrapers. Making a fuss not only draws attention to them, but opens you up to legal problems if you happen to be wrong or mistaken.
Second, when dealing with hosts and the search engines, it is important to file a DMCA notice with them in order to ensure that the work is removed. I have DMCA templates and contact information on my site if required but it is a law that is important to use in that it is how you ensure copyright infringing material is removed.
Finally, taking content from their site will hurt you. One of the worst parts of content theft is the duplicate content penalties. If search engines see content from their site appearing after the fact on yours, guess who they might think the spammer is.
That’s all I have for right now. I hope that this helps!
thanks for the info!!
Jonathan and others: I agree about #9 and will remove it. In fact it was little childish of me or rather too much along the an eye for an eye revenge line.
As to the DMCA complaints: Unfortunately many content thieves are outside the US but nevertheless you should consider this step, especially combined with #5.
Onreact: Two more things.
One, even if the content thief is outside the U.S., it only matters where the site is hosted and most are hosted within the U.S.
Even if the site is outside of the U.S. (and EU, Australia and other countries with similar laws), you can still use it in conjunction with the search engines as they are all, more or less, housed with in the U.S.
An Australian man can use the DMCA against a Russian spam blogger if the site or search engines are in the U.S. It happens every day.
Hope that helps!
What I noticed was the people who took my content were posting it with a date prior to mine. It is frustrating to have this happen and your ideas are probably worth doing. I do know that a complaint to wordpress dot com will quickly close a site.
You know, it is interesting. The site that used my content was quickly shut down by WordPress (within a day) - but, guess what? They were up and running - doing exactly the same thing the next day - using a different provider.
Thanks for blogging about this Tad, it does get annoying. Also, thanks Highena, for that reference :)
Excellent, proactive and positive statements written in a fresh way that motivates.
These are prompt, can-do actions. I will put these to use right away on my wordpress splog problem.
A great post. Digital content piracy is a huge problem for publishers, particularly those where the content is used a tool for commercial gains. We have faced similar issues where our images have been stolen and used on a website for commercial benefits and when requested the images to be removed, the publisher played the hardball.
really cool tips. will surely use if them. keep sharing. :)
When your posts have already gone popular, why care about thieves? All the links you got should prevent Google from mistaking the thieve as the original source and thus not harm your rankings.
Malte: For several reasons. Your post might get deindexed after a while or lose it’s Google juice due to being buried in the archives while content thieves tend to “submit to 100 social bookmaking sites” so that after a while they rank higher than you or you get deindexed because of that.
Also if you check some of the stolen posts that have been submitted to StumbleUpon you’ll notice that many of them have many more stumbles than the originals.
Last but not least: It’s not like with music. When I’m downloading Madonna I am not telling anybody that I wrote “like a virgin” myself.
Excellent post about content theft and great suggestions!
Wow this is a excellent post.
Only once have I come across someone ripping of my content but he stopped for some reason.
I have made personal arrangements with some magazines to re-publish parts of their content that are relevant to my users.. the magazines have agreed to this and I provide a link back to them. I feel that this benefits both parties. Does this harm my rankings?
After finding one of my articles on airport parking posted on a competitor’s site covered by their copyright and syndicated though 80+ sites, I wrote an article on plagiarism and what to do about it. I cited their site and emailed it to them saying I would publish the article and file a DMCA with Google if the article wasn’t removed.
They responded almost immediately and the article was removed.
This worked well with a large site with lots to lose, it’s the faceless blogs that are the nightmare.
If you are lucky enough to have them hotlinking your content you can use .htaccess to serve their visitors alternate images… like off-topic 1500×1000 pixel jpg files ;)
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Help! My content has been stolen and . . . oh, never mind…
As a regular reader of SEO 2.0, I was shocked, SHOCKED that my content could possibly be stolen by the dregs of webdom. Lazy clouts unable to articulate original thoughts, poaching my wisdom, insight, and wit. Shame on them.
And using Copyscape (tha…
10 Ways to Fight Back Content Thieves…
10 ways you can fight back against content thieves….
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