What To Do If Someone Steals Your Blog Posts

This morning I woke up, prepared some coffe and opened up my laptop to quickly deal with emails. No biggies, until I saw this below:

New pingback notification? “Cool” I think, “someone’s linking to my content”. Then I want to have a look at how this guy’s citing what I’ve written in the past and that’s where I find something that’s already happened to many other people who manage to write online such as bloggers, freelance writers, web designers: someone copy-paste your blog post on their blog and add their signature.

My blog post “Why Content Strategy, Content Marketing and SEO Are The Future For Small Businesses”, published on April 24, 2014 got partially duplicated on a website called copyranger.com and published by a guy named CopyRanger.

As you can see, 180+ words from my blog post were copied on this website. Just looking up at the website I can easily find that behind CopyRanger there’s a guy named Rick Duris. So I check him on Google and find he’s not new to this activity. That’s why I need to act now, immediately to remove this unauthorized copy of my blog post from his blog.

What this guy’s doing falls under what’s commonly called content scraping, which has a bad impact on the ranking factors of the original source of the content.

Someone’s stealing your blog posts? This is what you need to know

When I find someone stealing my content and put it back on their website under their name, without asking me for any authorisation, I get pissed off.

It already happened to me in the past and I made them taking down my stolen content from the hosting providers. I claimed a copyright infringement to their hosting provider and this ensured my copyrighted materials were preserved.

Here’s how you can do the same.

What to do if you find a website’s copied your content without any authorization

1. Check their domain information with a WHOIS look up. You can use a service like who.is
2. Go to their registrar website and look for the sitemap to quickly find a page called “Site Terms of Use and DMCA Claims” or anything similar.
3. Find the copyright infringement address (if any) and send a detailed email explaining what happened

I created an email template that I use when things like this happen and I need to claim any copyright infringement. You can copy it and edit to better fit your scenario:

What can you expect when you claim a copyright infringement like this?
Most of the times, hosting providers take the copy down. In short: you win.

Conclusion

Managing your online presence is difficult, not only because you need to create great content, pay attention to your SEO and keywords, but also because there are plenty of people stealing what you’ve sweat your guts out on just with a couple of click or via automated techniques (like scraping via RSS feed).

Now you have the tools and an email template to fight them back. It’ll take some time, but you’re going to win them. Be assured.

[Image: Rupert Ganzer]