What do I do if a website steals my content?
Report stolen content to Google
I recently discovered a website that had stolen the content from the website project I am working on. I found the duplicate content culprits using Google, I took this to mean Google had indexed their page and was not indexing mine due to the search engine seeing my content as being the duplicate.
This has been a real problem for me in my current role as Google Webmaster Tools is telling me that Google has indexed 2/116 URLs of the website. This is a big problem concerning SEO’s – I need to find out why Google isn’t indexing the pages and what to do about the stolen content.
After studying the website that copied the content, and the process needed to go through with Google in order to remove their page from the index I decided not to go through Google. It seemed to me that the process is a bit drawn out and involves correspondence with not only Google but the site containing the stolen content.
Here is the process to report stolen content to Google
Basically there is a copyright act for the internet called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This act protects content owners publishing content on the web – providing they publish the content first. You have to write to Google in the US declaring stolen content, then the website that stole your content, and somewhere along the line hopefully the matter is resolved.
I do not have the luxury of time, as of course we all know – time is money! So I decided not to contact Google in the US, as I am in the UK and the offending website is in Nigeria. I instead decided to re-write the pages they have copied. This new content should draw the search engines back to the website and have them index the pages.
Looks like the under-handed criminals have won this battle – but with my much more SEO text and less spelling mistakes in the new content, they will not win the war!
