Content Copying – an outcome

Had an email discussion with a site that had copied content directly from here to their site.

It was short, and lead to a successful outcome – that being the removal of my article from their site.  On the back of that, there are a few other sites that I will now be in contact with, and hopefully have similar successful results.

I have no problem whatsoever with sites commenting on my articles, even talking to my points, or reinforcing their own with references to mine.  The problem I feel is those who simply copy the content directly, often without credit.

So far, none of these sites have provided email contact details, but if you head over to a site such as whois.com, and enter a URL, you can find out the registration details for the URL, which includes contact details.

Site Plagiarism

One of my very active blogs has a continual problem with plagiarism, to the point that it is simply content theft. Posts that I make on a subject are taken and posted on other sites which are then surrounded with Google advertisements or similar. They hope, I imagine, that a Google search for a particular term will cause people to visit their site rather than mine, and then click on one of the Google adverts, generating income.

Battling this sort of theft is a drawn out process, which despite the technology of the current day and age, still requires an actual letter, envelope and stamp to send notification to Google to get any action on their behalf. Strange for the world’s largest Search Engine to use such a technique to discourage complaints. However, this article is not about that, or Google, but finding sites that have stolen your content.

There are (I am sure) many tools out there for assisting, and one that I have been using is called Copyscape.

You enter the URL of your web page, and Copyscape trawls the net looking for occurrences. I don’t use a paid subscription version of it, so I am not sure how much better it can be, but at least it is a start.