It happens to every blogger at a certain point: their content is stolen.
The first you'll know about it is, usually, a pingback notification from a blog linking to one of your past posts. When you look in more detail, you'll realise that the link was originally an internal one – and your whole post has been reproduced.
Usually, it's through an automated system, with some low-quality, scammy blog reprinting your whole post.
Occasionally, it's by an individual who simply doesn't know better – they reproduce your post, keeping your name and probably even a link back to the original in place.
If you're not sure whether people might be stealing your content, Kristi Hines has a great post on KISSmetrics: Content Scrapers – How to Find Out Who is Stealing Your Content & What to Do About It.
So what can you do?
You've got three key options:
- Do nothing at all
- Contact the blog owner
- Contact their web host
Here's how they break down.
#1: Do Nothing At All
If you want, you can simply ignore this theft. It may make you angry, or upset – but you may decide that it's not worth wasting your energy pursuing it.
The blogs stealing content in this way are invariably very low quality, and unless they're outranking you on Google for your own posts, you're unlikely to lose traffic as a result of them reprinting your post.
It is possible, however, that if you get lots of links from low-quality blogs, Google may penalise you because it thinks you're buying links or exchanging them. (Alternatively, you might find these links actually help your rankings – but personally I definitely wouldn't count on that.)
#2: Contact the Blog Owner
In situations where you can find contact details, emailing the blog owner is usually enough to get your post removed.
Keep in mind that the person stealing your post may simply not know any better. They could be quite young, or very new to blogging. You don't need to threaten legal action at this stage (though if they refuse to remove your post, you might want to).
#3: Contact their Web Host
By law, web hosting companies like Dreamhost and Hostgator have to take action against sites that are infringing copyright. (Your posts are automatically copyrighted when you publish them on your blog, unless you explicitly license them for reuse under Creative Commons.)
To get a site (or a post on it) taken down, you need to submit a DMCA Notification to the webhost. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
You can find the host company by searching on whois.net for the domain name – look for the "whois server". On the company website, search for "DCMA takedown" or similar. Here's DreamHost's instructions, for instance.
You can also submit a request to Google to remove the content from their search engine.
Note: The DCMA may not apply in your case if you and/or the site stealing your content are outside the US. Read Do DCMA Notices Work Outside the U.S.? for more details.
Personally, I've never had to escalate to #3 – I've either ignored content scraping or I've emailed the owner to ask for my content to be removed.
I'd always advise contacting a site first before submitting a DCMA Notification: it's probably much quicker, and in some cases, the site may have stolen your content unwittingly.
(This actually happened to me earlier today – I found out that a blog I read had published an article from a guest poster that was heavily based on one I wrote two years ago. The host blog had acted in good faith and believed the article was unique. A quick email to them sorted it out.)
Has your content ever been stolen? What did you do about it? Share your experiences in the comments.
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