You’ve copyscaped your site and found that other websites are using your content. What can you do?
Link-backs:
Link-backs are a great SEO tool. If somebody is using your content, you may as well get some benefit out of it:
- Contact the site and ask them to provide a link back to your site, and reference you as the source.
- If they don’t comply or respond, and it’s just a paragraph of post, probably best to just let it go.
Content Scraper:
But what happens if somebody has trawled you site and replicated a lot of the content, and they have no interest in linking back or referencing you as a source?
Why should you care?
If website rankings are important to you, you should care. If your content has been stolen by a content scraper site, they could be outranking you in the search results.
What can you do?
There a couple of simple, no-cost options:
- File a SPAM report with Google. There’s a check-box to indicate “Duplicate site or pages” – so you can report the offending site to Google for investigation.
- Most of the copy scraper sites rely on AdSense revenue. If they’ve illegally copied your content, and have AdSense on their site – reporting them to Google for copyright violation can terminate their AdSense agreement.
Another option?
- File a complaint with the person’s ISP if they have published your work on their site.
- You can do this through www.whois.net
I hadn’t come across Yoast before. On my other blog I use All in One SEO – but I’m going to test drive Yoast as my all in one SEO for this site… thanks for the tip. There’s so many plug-in’s out there, it’s great to hear which one’s are being utilized by others.
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/
Good source article for action to take when somebody steals your content. It’s long, but has some good points.
Hi Jay very useful information. Have found a few people copying content on my site but not attributing me to it! I wasn’t sure what to do.
Paul — in a way it’s a compliment that they like your content! I’ve read a few stories about folks who have gone through Google to complain, and have been successful.
I don’t mind people using my content, as long as I get credit and a link back.
Hope things work out for you.
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