Your Content Has Been Stolen, Now What?

The other day, I was checking my sites to see if any sploggers have misappropriated material for their own benefit. Along the same lines, Mike of Fiftyfoureleven.com fame wrote a nice piece in February 2006. Thought I reference the main sections here:

• Tools of the trade: “Google of course works fairly well for finding duplicate content on the web, but the tool of choice for this task is Copyscape (…).”
• Techniques: “I find that flagrant reproduction of RSS feeds is an easy one to handle. A simple note explaining that If the content is not removed in 48 hours we will be advising your hosts, your registrar and the major search engines of the infraction will usually get the ball rolling quite nicely. (…)”

  “Plain theft of copy (as in not RSS republishing) can be a bit more difficult (who’s copy is it?), but quite often, as Mike Davidson explains here, people who have been caught generally back down quite quickly. (Replace the word you in that comment with ISP and it is a decent description of how a DMCA complaint against a site works.)”

• Why fight?: “The major issue for me is duplicate content in Google - I’ve had other sites ranking above mine where they are running my content - I’m not a big fan of that. (…) So for me it is worth keeping a lookout once in a while. This is especially easy with newer sites that get little traffic, but if you know your sites well enough, you’ll can see dips in traffic to certain areas that you know should be higher. That can be a sign that it’s time to do some research!”

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