Difference between revisions of "Learn/What-to-Do-If-Your-Content-is-Stolen"

Revision as of 01:19, 11 November 2010

[Some brief into about what happened to us with ispey.com, linking to the blog post that tells that story]

You've spent months or years building your website and its content, and one day you find that some thrown together website has scraped your site, copied your content and tried to pass it off as its own.

It's incredibly frustrating. And unfortunately, I have to say there isn't much you can do about it.

This hasn't happened to my site. Can I prevent it from happening?

The robots.txt file on your website gives you the ability to request that certain bots or spiders do not crawl your site. So it would be possible to tell search engines spiders it's okay to crawl your site, and ask all other bots not to. The problem here is that robots.txt is a sort of gentleman's agreement that respectful websites and bots abide by, but the types of websites that would send bots to scrape content are very unlikely to respect your robots.txt. (Also, disallowing all bots besides search engines bots you name can be risky for SEO because search engines sometimes change the name of their bots and then you would effectively remove your website's pages from that search engine's results when that happened.)

How can I know?

One of the best things you can do is keep track of people and websites talking about you. You can set up a Google Alert for your business name, website name, and maybe the title of important pieces of content on your site. This way you will get an email when something that meets your criteria pops up on the web. There are also other tools you can use to actively track what people are saying about you.

Beyond keeping an eye out for foul play, it's a great way to help manage your online reputation and find opportunities to engage with your audiences.

So your content has been copied. What can you do?

• Contact the site and ask nicely, but firmly

Try looking for contact information on the website itself. If that doesn't work, check the site's whois record on a site like {{{2}}} (visit).

If you can't get in touch with them, or if they don't respond appropriately, move on to plan B and go above their head.

• Talk to the people that control their website

Contact their registrar or hosting company to let them know about the offending site.

• Report it to Google
  • If you are confident that you have a legal copyright case you can report copyright infringement to Google that violates DMCA. Be warned: This can take a long time, and if you lose you will be responsible for attorney fees.
  • If a site is violating a law other than copyright, you can submit a legal removal request. This applies "if you have a court order establishing that a site is in violation of the law, or if you have identified a clear case of a legal violation for which Google has a removal responsibility".
  • You can also try reporting spam to Google. In the case of someone copying your content without attribution, there is a check box option for "duplicate site or pages" that may apply. Note: Not all spam reports are read, and Google is generally looking for and focusing their action on larger offenders so that they will have the biggest impact on improving search.

• Shine a light on them
  • Let the interwebs know what happened to you, and about the site that scraped your content. Say something that publicly visible like on Twitter or your blog.
  • Make sure the site's online reputation reflects their bad behavior. Give them a red rating and descriptive comment on {{{2}}} (visit), and try other consumer sounding board sites like ComplaintsBoard.com, RipoffReport.com, SiteJabber.com, etc.