I recently discovered the for the past few days a website is copying my articles. My website is a tech-news website and the other site is a news website that has a technology&it category. I visited the site and apparently all news from there are copied from many other sources. Most probably this is a auto-website. The thing is that that website at the end of the artcile has a link to my original article like this: "Source: My Website", where "My Website" is a link. Backlinks are always good, but I don't really like someone just copying word-by word (even images...and he does not even hosts them just linking to my image). Should I contact the owner and request him to stop what he is doing or not?
Images hotlinking can be stopped by you through your cpanel Regarding backlinks, yes this is a good idead, but not so good idea when your whole article is copied. You can try sending a mail to the owner, though i believe if it is a auto blog it might not even reach the webmaster, you can also make a DMCA complaint where in google will start de-indexing the articles from their search results and the webmaster will automatically dump the blog or delete those posts in due course, a time taking process but can help in the long run.
I know I can disable image hotlinking from cPanel. That is my next stop. But still have some mixed fillings about the articles. Like I said...backlings are good. But to copy entire articles, even if most are not very long, isn't that good for me. Most probably I will try to contact the owner and ask him to only put intro's of the articles...and if that fails, I will send a DMCA. Thanks for your response. If anyone has any other suggestions please let me know.
There are tons of sites like that and they are unlikely to hurt you, because Google can easily see that it's an autoblog and you're the original author. It gets ugly when some higher ranking site or forum copies your article without giving a backlink - in this case Google may consider the copying site as the author. But in your case all should be fine.
Don't worry about it, those autoblogs that don't provide any value come and go constantly. Just stick to your site, keep writing content because Google still recognizes you as the original author.
it also happens there in online. so dont worry. one day Google mark the site and will be black listed.
Thanks for your advises. I contacted the owner and had my website removed from his database of crawler. I only got 5-7 visits in four days from him and my articles were usually lost between other stolen content.