Stealing Content

There is a certain site that continuously steals content from our blog. They post on their site and provide an excerpt saying its from some other person (i.e. Here is an excerpt on "Topic": Alex Wrote: insert stolen content here).

I don't know if this is helping their site or our site out but my concern is that we have incoming links from this stolen content and within their blogroll, they have links to porn sites and sex video sites.

We don't want to incur any penalties so how do we prevent this? We posted something on our blog and it was stolen and used here http://youcanfish.info/wp/2008/05/06/fluke-regulations-2/. If you click the "Read the rest of this great post here" link, it points back to our site and our original post but we did not give any permission for this to be used.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

The fact that they link to adult sites as well as yours will do nothing to hurt you, linking to - or running - adult sites is not against Google's TOS although "adult classification" would affect PR (subject to "capping") it would affect theirs, not yours.

What they are - effectively - doing is copying your content and linking back to you as the main source... so it's not "theft" in the normal sense (in fact - if it were wikipedia you'd probably be quite happy)!

If you are worried purely because their site also contains adult content or links to adult content, imho you shouldn't be because it shouldn't affect you at all.

If you are worried because you don't want excerpts of your content copied - even with links to your site as the original source - you will have to pursue it like any other stolen content issue.

Right now the link is broken anyway, either they mistyped the url or you've changed it (in which case you should redirect).

Effectively they aren't "harming you"... and if your content is in a "blog with rss feed on"... you "HAVE" authorized others to use your content on their domains... "YOU HAVE GIVEN PERMISSION" whether that was your intention or not... you've requested synication.

...if you wish to keep your content for yourself, remove the RSS feed and they we likely never find your content to post.

Once you have RRS turned off you can file a DMCA takedown order if you wish.

It won't hurt your site
They have actually acted honorably by including links to your site

I found a site that took my content word for word and did not give me any credit

Thanks guys. I was a little nervous that they are also linking out to porn like sites. I wasnt sure if we were going to get grouped into a bad neighborhood type of thing. I wasn't too upset with them "stealing" (now seeing i've used a strong term to describe this) b/c they were linking back to us.

Like Clicky said, I wish it were wikipedia or some other powerhouse taking the content.

You should be happy they even gave you the link. Odds are though if you had linked keywords, they have co-opted those. If you submitted the article to article sites then they might have peeled it from there, RSS or no.

If the link isn't working, as someone said, I'd be more concerned about contacting them and saying, "Hey, link it to here, because I'm not getting my link juice". I've had to track down a few article manipulators, and yours sound like they've been pretty fair, minus the broken link.

I figured it couldnt be bad if they were linking back to the site but the info was either taken from an RSS or one of the submissions sites we submitted to as noted. My only concern was that we may get hung up b/c their site was linking to adult type sites while having our links on the same page. Just an absent minded thought after looking back.

Thanks to all for the clarification.