May 17th, 2007 by admin 2,481 Views
Today I suddenly got a lot of pingback comments from this website “www.wmshare.com” (I won’t link to a blog that steals content from mine and other blogs). This blog is pubblishing the articles of a lot of blogs automaticaly through RSS. Today it pubblished 3 of my new articles (and not only a part of it but the whole content) and also all the articles John Chow wrote today.
How did i discover that the thief was stealing my articles?
In this case it was very easy. The blog copied the whole content of my articles and some of them had keywords pointing to other articles i wrote recently. That’s why I immediately recieved pingback comments from Wordpress and I was able to discover it.
It’s not always that simple to find out if someone is stealing your content so I decided to list two tips that will help you to find out when your content was stolen:
- use tools like Copyscape to search the web for copies of your website or single pages. This tool is also useful to find out if someone has not only stolen your content, but also your layout.
- If you think that someone might have stolen your article, you can use Google to discover it. All you have to do is to search for a long sentence of your article (15-20 words) and you can immediately see if there are other pages with this exact combination of words you searched for. If Google gives more than 1 search result for a sentence longer than 15 or more words, check the websites that have this sentence inside their content because they probably copied your article.
Someone stole my articles, what now?
First of all try to send an email to the owner of the blog asking him to remove your content cause you did not give him the permission to pubblish it. If this does not help you can try to leave a comment in one of your stolen blog posts asking him to remove it immediately.
The owner is not willing to remove my content from his blog, what can I do?
You will have to contact the hosting company of the content thief (you can find out where the site is hosted thanks to Whois.net).
How can I proof them that he is stealing my content?
- Search your article and the copied article in Google and proof that your article was indexed by Google spiders before his article (you can see that by clicking on “cache”).
- Let them know about your visitors, PageRank and since how long your website is established. Usually content stealing websites are new websites without PageRank and traffic.
- Compare your Technorati rank with the Technorati rank of the thief so that you can proof that you are already a popular blogger.
- Sent them some other statistics about both sites: Alexa rank, number of pages of your website indexed by Google, number of backlinks and so on. The more information you can retrieve, the better.
In this particular case it will be very easy to proof that it’s him stealing my content, and not me stealing his content.
Why?
1) He has links pointing to articles on my blog inside his stolen articles.
2) This article will be pubblished on his blog because the posts are pubblished automaticaly. This means that this guy is going to post an article that says that his blog is stealing content.
Finally I saw that he is also monetising the stolen content with Google Adsense ads…that’s why I contacted Google to let them know about the stolen content.
Let’s see how long it will take until this guy gets banned from Google Adsense.
Nice article. SEO Black Hat had an article a while back about how you could really mess a scraper up. I’ll see if I can find it. Basically what happened is that you throw his scraper program into a loop that starts scraping his own site, not yours, so that all the stuff he’s posting is his own stuff, over and over. I think he did it through .htaccess.
Don