When you’ve invested anywhere between a few days to several months or even years on creating quality web content, the last thing you want is for someone to steal it and for search engines to reward them instead of you.
Business owners and entrepreneurs strive to make websites and its content stand out to their consumers. As many of you know creating engaging content that attracts qualified traffic is increasingly challenging.
From stealing web copy to images and even copying website designs, it’s hard to protect your creative work when it is accessible to everyone on the internet.
Before you start doing anything, you have to take screenshots.
It is completely natural to immediately contact the parties who copied your content. But hold on a moment. First, take screenshots of the duplicates and if possible, you can use the Wayback Machine tool to view the crawled pages. Likewise, you have to take screenshots of your own work for proof when you go through the next steps.
Before consulting the legal team, here are a few tips which explain what to do when someone copies content from your website.
Reach out to the owner of the website and request them to take down the page/pages. If it is just a single page or a few design elements, they might work with you to fix it.
If they don’t respond to your request, you have to get information via WHOIS search. When a person registers for a domain, they will be asked to give their contact information. You can find out the information by doing a Whois search.
Once you do the search, you will get a long list of information along with the email ID of the domain owner. If you contact the owner through that email ID, sometimes it’ll reach the right person, but in some cases, it can lead to a dead end. For example, if you do a Whois search for Wisevu.com, you will get this result.
Only the registrar will be revealed. You won’t be able to find any contact information because we use Privacy Guardian to hide them from public view.
In such situations, you can see if there are any contact details about the owner on their website or check if they have a social media presence.
If the website owner is still not responding or if their contact details are protected, try implementing the steps we’ve discussed below.
If you have enough evidence of the copied material, you can contact the server host of that website and send in a request to take down the page. If the evidence you submit is convincing, the web host will most likely remove the blog or page completely.
To do this, you have to identify which server host they are using. You can get the registrar and network information by using a website called Hosting Checker.
Some popular hosts will also provide abuse email and telephone number. You can call or send an email specifying what was copied and the hosting company will guide you further.
If you do a search on Hosting Checker for Wisevu, you will get the below result.
According to Google, Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:
Google takes low-quality content and plagiarized content very seriously. Way back in 2011, Google introduced an update called Panda which was meant to stop websites with thin content, duplicate content, low-quality content, and content which lacks authority/trustworthiness. In the SEO industry, Panda has been cited as an update which is difficult to recover from. To know more about the Panda update and how to recover from it, click here to read more. Plus, take a look at Google’s content policy to learn about their guidelines.
If you’re struggling to find a solution, you can submit a Google DMCA request to remove the copied content. Here are some of the direct links to the respective contact forms.
Once you submit the appropriate form, you can monitor your request. If the evidence you submit is valid, Google will remove the copied content. In case the copied content has been indexed, Google will not be able to take any action.
In case if Google manually finds out if only a certain part of a page/website is copied and the rest is original content, based on our general understanding, it might drop the search ranking of that page/website.
By submitting the above content removal request, the page(s) may be removed only from Google Search. If you need the content or page to be taken down from other search engines, you can also submit a request to other search engines like Bing DMCA, Yahoo’s Copyright and IP Policy, and AOL Reporting Claims of Copyright Infringement.
If you want the whole website to be taken down, you can issue a DMCA Takedown through DMCA.com. They are a private company who can remove images, text, video, audio, products etc. irrespective of the location of the infringing website. Even if the copied content is just one paragraph, they can remove it. However, we are unaware of how they will remove the content. So you have to contact DMCA to find out the content removal process for your case.
For full service take down, DMCA charges $199 per website and for Webmasters DIY takedown, they charge $10/month or $100/year. All you have to do is fill this takedown form, select your service type and submit the form to DMCA.
This should be an absolute last resort because of the time, stress, and resource involvement. If a large-scale website and its SEO value are on the line, legal action may be worthwhile. If it is just a few pages, you can take the Google DMCA approach.
If content duplication is a continuous issue for you, there are a variety of tools which can help you.
If someone has copied your content, don’t worry. There are many ways to protect them. Try to implement the solutions in our blog and see how things work. If you are concerned about the possibility of this happening frequently, you can file for copyright protection.
If you have any questions or suggestions on how to remove copied content, feel free to mention about it in the comments section below.
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