We recently put out an article on our site, as we have done for years, but for some reason, quite a few blogs and news aggregators have pickup up on it - copied it word for word, and put it on their sites (including wordpress.com, blogger.com, scoop. When I search for the title, my article doesn't come up (at least on the first few pages of google) just endless copies of it. Is there anything I can do? It's really annoying to get ripped off so badly, by so many people. I've tried emailing a few of these people - no response. Why has google put the original source so low on the listings? (and yes I use good HTML, header tags, keywords etc)
make sure you pop your link into the next article you do and see if they copy that. If they are going to steal your content then you might aswell try and steal there traffic
Thanks for the reply. Some (like the wordpress blogs) left links intact. Scoop stripped out all links But my real issue is google. Just don't know why i'm not number 1
a couple did, but the number 1 result in google (scoop.co.nz) didn't They just stole all the text, and stripped out all the links
We have a bunch of losers like that on this forum. They steal peoples hard work just so they can earn pennies from Adsense. It's bullshit. That's why you want to stay away from writing blogs about making money online and whatnot because your content will get copied to hell and you'll never see the fruits of your labor, if you don't already have an established blog or website.
Send them official mail--snail mail would show that you know who they are and where they live--telling them they are violating your copyright and to remove the story immediately. If they are in other countries, that can be a problem.
You might want to check this one out, I believe this is the exact answer to you question here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
Yeah there's your revenge right there, unfortunately it won't stop the larger problem and probably will be slow to have any effect.
Just file a DMCA request or if its a big site just request they give you a backlink to your site, that will help your rankings more than one stolen article
Have you thought of contacting google and asking them to penalise those sites who host the copied content? This kind of stuff really makes me angry too.
Another way to make your article rank first is to juice it up with some high quality backlinks - linking directly to your article. Bookmark it five to ten places, maybe create a squidoo lens named for your article title, get some links from some high page rank forums and put a link directly to that article in your sig file. An hour or so of work can return the rankings to your original article and also grab traffic back from the content thieves. Dan
it happens wit me some times too. Someone copied my contents and and gave it same title. And was ranked above me in google. What the !!