Someone Steals My Content and Ranks Higher than Me: How to identify stolen content and take action
by Tony Yeung — Original Published at Apartment Number 2, “Contents Plagiarism: How to Identify the Stolen Contents and Take Actions”
Have you had content thefts?
It is annoying to have someone who steals your content from your website. At the worst, the thefts can rank higher than you.
In this article, I will show how to take actions on the content thefts.
Identify Content Thefts
It takes countless hours to create good contents for your website. When you discover that someone has stolen most of your content and publish them on their website without your consent or credit, that situation could be very annoying.
The duplicate contents, nevertheless, can affect your website rankings on search engines. Recently, many users on Inbound have discussed stolen contents and asked for help.
Here are some actions that webmasters can take.
First, the website owners should identify the contents. You can have a quick search on Google to determine what your contents show up on the Internet. You can select some contents on your website randomly to run a query. The first search result should be your website. If you found some identical contents on another site that is not owned by you, that means someone has copied your content.
Notes: When you can randomly select some contents on your website to run a query, do not search what you quote from another website. You end up getting search results from other website or the original person who you quoted from.
Investigation
Once when you found the suspicious website on the search result, you should investigate. You should check that website to see if your contents were copied exactly without your consent. You can click “ctrl + F” to perform several searches of your contents on that website. Based on the several searches, if you can identify most of the contents are yours, you will have to take more actions against such plagiarism.
Take Action: (1) Contact the Webmaster
A few of actions you can take. I would not report to the search engine right after you identify your contents are being stolen.
In fact, this is another opportunity to build a backlink! If you notice the copycat website ranking higher than you, you should contact the webmaster for linking back to your website with your keyword and ask the webmaster to add “rel=canolical” tag.
This action can have few benefits. First, you can receive a good backlink from higher ranking site to your website. You receive some offsite SEO benefit. Second, the search engine would recognise the duplicate contents yet not consider as spam because of this backlink with rel=canolical tag. Third, a higher ranking website means it has some decent amount of traffic. The backlink can drive more traffic to your website.
If the webmaster refuses to create a link back to your website, you will have to take another step — ask the webmaster to delete the contents.
Note: you can also ask the website to have the nofollow link with rel=canolical tag. If you cannot find any contact information, you can also contact the web hosting provider.
Take Actions (2) Report to the Search Engine or file a DMCA request
If the webmaster ignores your request, you can file a report to the search engine. Google has a very clear guideline to protect your own contents.
On the other hand, you can file a DMCA request and Google will take the duplicated contents down. To file a DMCA request, you need to show that you are the business owner or the website owner. If you are the employee of the company, you need to have the authority to act on behalf your company before filing the report.
There are options for the request. You can go to the DMCA website and choose the options. You can choose to do the takedown or DMCA helps you to takedown. It takes about 7 to 10 days to process and have a respond.
Wrapping Up
Plagiarism is an unethical practice. Once when you verify the duplicated contents, you can take a few actions.
So what is your experience? what actions have you taken for plagiarism?
(All GIFs are from GIPHY)
About the Author
Tony Yeung is a digital marketing specialist and the owner of Apartment Number 2, a consultancy focused on helping entrepreneurs and marketers see results with SEO, social media, and content marketing. Apartment Number 2 has worked with a range of clients from Publishing Company and Medical Company to a new startups.
