Someone copying your website

[Contra]

I have some stuff up on my website as a basic sales pitch for my contracting company. I took time to write all this out myself, but now I see that another contractor across the country stole a lot of it word for word and put his own company name into it.

Is this going to hurt my as far as SEO?

The thing that aggravates me is that mine has been indexed by Google for almost 2 months while his is brand new, yet when searching Google for those phrases his website comes up while mine is hidden because it's a duplicate Is there any way to prove that mine was original since it was index first?

[Louis Wheeler]

Since Google has indexed your website first (before the your content was stolen) then your website will NOT be damaged from a SEO purspective because of duplicate content on the web. Google knows you are the original creator of the content because you were the first to put it on the internet.

But be aware in the future that whomever can get any particular content indexed first IS the original author of that particular content in the eyes of Google. So you're OK.

For your other concern: The reason that the other guy's website is apparently showing a higher rank than your website is because of possible off-page SEO factors.

Hope this helps.

[Contra]

That's the odd thing, his page is brand new so I don't think off page SEO is helping.

It's not just that his website is outranking mine that is bothering me, when I Google phrases that are on my site his website comes up alone and after that I get this message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

I have to click on the Repeat the search link in order to see my site

[imexperttools]

Maybe because he use Google Adwords and you are not so Google is being biased here ;) Just kidding but in the future, to prevent these kinds of problems try to prevent them from copying the content from your site by disabling the right click function on your site.

[freedom810]

You can use the website copyscape to find duplicate content. Why not try contacting the other web user and requesting that he take the content down?

Unless your a large company with lawyers I imagine its quite hard to put pressure on though. The company I work for sends out legal notices if users don't remove our content. Although I'm sure they always do.

[eddyf]

"... Why not try contacting the other web user and requesting that he take the content down?"

I've done that twice and it worked both times. You want to start with a polite, but firm email with a completion date. There are sample letters on the web.

Basically, you want them to believe re-writing their content will be a whole lot easier than the legal hassle you're about to send their way.

Ed