Checking my blog for backlinks and came across a site which has copied at least eight of my pages (but, I suspect that they have been copying my content since December, maybe 500+ pages), not just a paragraph but all the marked-up content, hotlinked images and even my Technorati tags. Only one of the copied pages appears in Google’s SERPs (I'm no1 for keyword phrase, copied page is no2), all of the copied pages are below me in Yahoo, MSN etc. The only things I know about the site at the moment are, it's older than my site, hosted in Indonesia and is part of a popular blog empire (all sites are run by the same adsense publisher). The site uses "Google and Chitika Ads" and is currently getting low traffic, only 40-50 uniques per day. (although this will change when pagerank is updated, it has 1,200 backlinks) What do I do next?
Does your blog have RSS feeds? Just asking, since the pages might not be copied, but you are feeding him/her content. tom
I would look at wayback machine and get proof I owned copy first. Then file a DMCA copyright infrimgement with Google. I would also write Adsense complaigning about copied material. If site hosted in Indonesia may be hard to get it taken down, in USA file complaint with their host. By all means set your htaccess to disable hotlinking. Good luck. Shannon
Yep, my blog has RSS feeds, I don't think they are getting them that way, but they could. I've had my content scraped from feeds before and they usually steal a plain text excerpt, this site has copied every word, HTML (elements and attributes), hotlinked images and have copied my Technorati Tags, which includes a tag for my Domain. I have a bad feeling that they are just finding my pages from Google, my blog was getting popular around 3,000 uniques a day from SERPs but I’m getting less than half that now. I use Wordpress and have been using the sitemeter plugin, started noticing some weird stuff going on, things like people searching for one thing and viewing 30-40 similar pages. Unfortunately my site and the offending site are not in the wayback machine. My domain name is on the copied pages as Technorati tags, and the images have been hotlinked, so I guess I could use that as proof that the content is mine? Thanks
I’ll keep you informed, I’ve been looking around, and found a few sites using my content. They all use Adsense like I do, so I’m thinking that if they make more $$$ than me, Google might not do anything.
Google will do the absolute minimum required by the DMCA while forcing you through the maximum possible amount of inconvenience. Details are here: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
I know that Google will do very little to help me in this situation, the copied pages aren’t hurting me at the moment, if they do I’ll have to take action.