Stolen content

These days I found the articles from one of my blogs on an unknown website. Obviously, my content was stolen. Later I found some more websites with my articles on them.

Several sites were using its RSS feed to publish my articles without link or mentioning, stealing my traffic and Google SERP. In fact my site got penalty for duplicate content. My own content!


So I did a little research what to do when site content is stolen.

How to find stolen content?
If your search engine traffic is going down no matter what you are doing or you don’t receive any visitors for your new, fresh and good articles, check for scrapers. The fastest way to find stolen content is to run a search with some specific text from your article in quotes.

What to do when your site content is stolen?
The first thing to do is to contact the scam site owner to remove your content. This part can be easy if he have a proper contact form or email on his site. In my case both sites hadn’t email or contact form. So I used WHOIS service to get their owners details. I got anonymous mails and I mailed them. No response.

Let’s see what Google says.
I found a post in Google Webmaster Central Blog - Duplicate content due to scrapers and this one on Google Adsense Blog - My content, your content, other people's content.
In short you can use this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport to report spam site. If you have problems with your traffic, you can try and ask for reconsideration from Google Webmaster tools. And you can fire a DMCA. Here is detailed information on how to do it - http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

You can contact the scraper’s hosting company and try to ask them for action.

In some of the above links I found one very useful advice. Always include your full link in your posts.

Stolen content is a very sensitive topic. It is not always easy to defend your work from cheaters. Most of the time search engines filter scam sites correctly but there is noting perfect. If you find your content stolen don’t panic and take the right actions.

Stolen Content on my SEO Strategy Blog.