The Blog

Go ahead make our day!

Steal our web copy and we’ll name & shame!

At webSEOlive we take pride in our SEO copy writing skills, either training our clients on how to write for the web or, if the clients prefer, undertaking copy writing ourselves under their auspices, particularly when writing for the Travel sector where we have considerable experience and passion.

Sadly when something works well, such as writing unique & original copy that repeatedly gets listed within Google’s top 3 listings on Page 1, it does draw the attention of our clients’ competitors who are looking to obtain those precious places.

What these ‘rival’ companies should do if they lack the skill set or experience to create such copy themselves is to employ someone who is sufficiently capable and understands their way around content for SEO; unfortunately more often than not many employ a plagiarist, who takes your valuable content, applies a couple of negligible changes and then tries to pass this off as their own original work, even though there is a perfectly large © symbol at the bottom of each page.  It always amazes us how companies are ‘big’ enough to employ content creators but are too stupid not to understand what © actually means.  For those that don’t know, here’s the definition:

“Copyright gives the author of an original work exclusive right for up to 100 years after  the authors death  in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium. Some jurisdictions also recognize ‘moral rights’ of the creator of a work, such as the right to be credited for the work. Copyright is described under the umbrella term intellectual property along with patents and trademarks.”

We have two sites for which we provide complete & ongoing web content and marketing solutions: the Jamaican eco resort Hotel Mocking Bird Hill and the Italian travel guide for Abruzzo Life in Abruzzo; it is this latter site which has fallen foul most recently of plagiarism.  Although we name and shame we won’t be posting the content stealers links to help their SEO, so if you want to see them you will have to find them and their links yourselves.

How you Know!

We were alerted to Abruzzopassion’s plagiarised use of our original copy on Lifeinabruzzo.com by multiple Google Alerts. Multiple articles were being published on article & travel feed sites which used virtually the exact same title, as well as the body text of this article.  The only changes were that they had replaced the village names and nature reserves and replaced them with their own. Outside the anger & frustration such content theft invokes, there was at least some scope therein for hilarity due to the presumably unintended absurdity of some of the alterations Abruzzopassion had posted…

Although these people claim to know their region intimately, they had inserted that you would be travelling in the footsteps on a notable Italian lady who hadn’t ever set foot in that part of the country, hiking amongst plants and trees that were unique to a particular area that we had described, even as far as pulling in UK/British references that we had made about the oak trees; they had taken the dimensions we had provided for a whole nature reserve and applied them instead to a small town; the final insult to injury was that they had then inserted at the bottom of the page an exact reference we had made in yet another of our pages to the modern British author Philip Pullman, quite quite staggering!

Steps to Battle the Sploggers & Free Riders

Make sure that you insert a © on your site within footer.  Also on your site have a clear copyright page that states to whom copy & images belong.  If people wish to use your text give them a form and an opportunity to do so, but naturally you can reserve the right to charge for such usage.

If you haven’t set up Google Alerts for your marketing already, we suggest you do so now to help protect your unique copy, it is amazing what it throws up.

Check each of your urls in Copyscape: simply add in the url and it will return the results on copyright infringements, it is really very easy and nifty.

If you use WordPress there are now plugins such as this Digital Fingerprint Theft, which you can insert add to your blog.

Make sure that your RSS feed only displays a teaser and not your full article and that it display the copyright symbol or a clear link for visitors to read.

Contact the Owner

In our scenario we contacted the owner of Abruzzopassion, who initially admitted breach of copyright and said that they would be removed, blaming the paid-for blogging service that they had employed to promote their site, which at the time we accepted and awaited the removal of the purloined text.

Sadly in this case the very same content then appeared as an article that appeared on the same site some 8 weeks later.  They were using SEO cloaking this time with no visible link in their navigation but a link from the homepage that featured different text than that actually linked to (the latter our plagiarised copy again).

Steps to Contacting the Owner

Send the owner of the site an email to politely insist that your plagiarised content is removed.  Make sure that you list the full urls and point out the similarities and/or of course obvious duplication.  Even though you will no doubt be boiling over with anger, politely request that they undertake to remove all page and article feeds.  This is difficult due to the nature of feed duplication on the web, so do allow a fortnight.

The 3-Pronged Approach

If this is not done or this is repeated as in our case it is time to take the 3-pronged approach

Contact the Website’s hosting company – Most hosting companies have strict terms about copyright issues and hosting websites that infringe the most basic aspect of good web behaviour.  To find out who hosts your copied content look at Whois; simply type in the domain name and it will return the results of the hosting company.  Look on the hosting website for a legal link normally in their footer. Most of them in this page will explain what to do in the case of stolen copy.  Some will accept emails, especially if you have email evidence where the plagiarism has already been admitted and you can then request under their terms & conditions they remove the individual page or site completely.

Contact Google Spam. If you have your site listed with Google’s webmaster tools you can make a request from here for them to remove duplicate content from their search page results. See here for instructions how.

Digital Millennium Copyright. Google states categorically that it is their policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Take a look at this page or just follow the instructions below in how to report your infringement

• Identify the specific URLs or other unique identifying information of material that Google has removed or to which Google has disabled access.
• Provide your name, address, telephone number, email address and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or Santa Clara County, California if your address is outside of the United States) and that you will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
• Include the following statement: “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that each search result, message or other item of content identified above was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled or that the material identified by the complainant has been removed or disabled at the URL identified and will no longer be shown.”
• Sign the paper.
• Send or fax the written communication to the following address:
• Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Counter Notification 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043. USA OR fax to: 001 (650) 963-3255, Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Counter Notification

This is the cheapest way to stop sploggers and lazy website owners who want your traffic but aren’t prepared to spend the time or invest monies in writing unique copy to get this.   Yes it is a pain, but the law is fully on your side so if you follow these tips you will always win.   If it is repeated again & again by the same people we do suggest that you in addition contact a lawyer who specialises in digital copyright.