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About a year ago, I read an eye-opening blog on
website plagiarism
and learned of a valuable tool for website owners....
Copyscape.com is an internet
service available to anyone who wants to scan the world wide web for
material copied from their website. The company's website indicates
they are the ones who provide
Google Alerts, a free service allowing anyone to monitor
the internet for the appearance of specific keywords or names.
Amazing technology indeed!
During my first visit to Copyscape last year, I learned that I could
run 5 free webpage scans per month, so what was there to lose? I
selected a few of my high traffic web pages and was stunned by the
results. I found one landscape company had stolen all the
content from 15 of my top web pages; text, photos, navigation bars
and all. There was another west coast landscaping business that had
hijacked 10 of my top photo web pages. They went to the trouble of
rearranging my photo pages slightly, but not enough to avoid
detection by Copyscape.
Yesterday I went a step further and did a Copyscape "batch search"
of this entire website for 5-cents per webpage. $20.00 well spent.
As with the first time I used their service, the results of
plagiarism ranged from minor to major, and approximately 20 website
owners ended up being contacted. The worst case this time was an
east coast lawn care website that "borrowed" all my images
and text from four pages. Two of those web pages had a great deal of
technical information on them, and each page had taken me more than
a day to create.
Do these sorts of discoveries make your blood boil?
You betcha!
Especially these worst case scenarios. Other cases of website
scraping aren't nearly as bold, maybe it just involves part of a
webpage, or it could be a few paragraphs. Where do you draw the
line? 100 or more words, especially copied word-for-word, will
definitely get your attention. It has the same feel as someone
picking your pocket.
Defending your web "turf" isn't pleasant, but it is
necessary. After all, original content is the very key to a good
website, and great web pages can take anywhere from a few hours to
few days to create. In the case of photo pages, it can actually take
a few years to gather a wide range of good plant photos. Duplication
of your website content will also hurt your web rankings, directly
and indirectly, especially if search engines think you are the
offender instead of the actual perpetrator.
Once you have learned which websites are guilty of scraping your
content, the first step is to contact them through their online
contact form, by email or telephone. At this point, you may also
want to seek out good legal counsel.
It's important to balance
the seriousness of your first message with some common courtesy,
since many business owners are completely unaware that an
unscrupulous webmaster stole text and photos from a copyrighted
website.
The reaction to your initial inquiry usually falls into one of three
categories:
1) Best Answer:
"We weren't aware that our webmaster used copyrighted material
from your website and we have already removed it. Sorry!"
2) The Challenger:
"Can you prove the website content is yours?" It's pretty
obvious these folks have never visited
The Wayback Machine.
It's a free website where you can view 85 billion web pages archived
since 1996, and see what they looked like at various points over the
last 13 years. These arguments are quickly solved if your site has
been out there for a number of years, and the content in question is
easy to see. Case closed.
3) No Response:
This leads to your second, more dedicated attempt to reach a website
owner. Most of them can be located using
WhoIs,
just by inserting their URL in the search feature. Displayed results
usually list the main contact person and email address for the
website, as well as their website hosting company. Otherwise you can
try using contact information directly from their website and locate
them using AnyWho with anything
from their personal or business name, to a reverse look-up of their
phone number.
If these initial efforts to contact the website owner fail, then you
can contact their website hosting company. At this point it becomes
a very serious issue. Plagiarized, scraped, stolen material
(whatever name you give it...) WILL cause a website to be
taken down by the website host once a carefully defined process has
been followed by the victim. This is a step you hope to avoid since
there was surely a large amount of time and expense in posting their
website. But hey, for the blatant offenders who have stolen large
amounts of original content, and especially those who refuse to, or
say they can't remove it, this is your final option.
Bob
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