Spamming/stealing from your site!

Check out this new service/search engine www.copyscape.com. It is powered by google to identify sites that have copied/stolen from your site.

We found a couple of link partners that pulled from us...thats great. And two sites that seem to be spamming/stealing away.

Have fun.

Dave

interesting... it doesn't have to be your entire page, if someone has a lot of your text in their page, this detects it.

Yes, I used it today to discover someone who had put my entire page in the footer of every one of their pages. An email to him got it quickly taken care of. I'll be using that service often, I'm sure.

How could they put an entire page on a footer?

It was hidden text but viewable in the source.

I'm not sure but I scanned another thread here that mentioned about bots that copy everything on your page. Bot crooks!

Wow...I have a lot of e-mailing to do; I didn't realize how many sites were ripping me off. Now I'm just in a bad mood...

[Edit]I'm calmer now; this isn't perfect, but is still helpful in eliminating shady competition. [/Edit]

Cygnus

Great another thing for my to-do list.

That thing is pretty sensitive. It found two phrases from one of my pages and matched it to a page on the University of Michigan's website somewhere. Not theft, just happened to be the same two phrases about two words apart.

Yes, it is sensitive, but it shows you how many words are copied (and various other things), so once you get used to using it, you can pretty easily determine what are really copies and what are just phrases here and there. I'm really glad I found it today.

What is appropriate in getting to the sites that ripped off content from your site. Do you legally threaten them, ask them nicely to remove it, reference copywrite protection or what?

Is there a norm for dealing with this? I'm originally from New Jersey/ Soprano country/ so my first instinct is to have their noses punch out my fist!

Dave

earlpearl, that was my first instinct too. i've also had this happen once before. both times, i was able to resolve it with an email. both times, it was due to an innocent site owner hiring a shady web marketing firm. however, just from my experience, a polite, but firm email explaining the situation, and then letting them know that you will report them to Google and their ISP usually works wonders. Explaining that Google may ban their site, and their ISP may remove the site from their server helps shed some light. You can also mention DMCA. I give them 24 hours to remove the code, and let them know that if it is not removed, I will notify Google, the ISP and whatever else might be necessary. The first time it happened, I was really worried because the website was based in some South American country (I forget where), so I didn't have a lot of legal choices. But the webmaster removed it immediately. So give that a try and good luck.

Thank you dazzlin. Good advice. I'll give that approach a try. Hopefully this tool stays around. great way to uncover unscrupulous sites.


Dave

Shows how easily Google could find duplicated pages.

I have a question on this. i just did a search this site is pulling picytures off my site full url as they are being pulled off the web. My question is is this a link from another site or not. I really don't care if he uses my pictures the question is can it hurt me or help me??? God Bless Joe

I guess you are trying to say that they are hotlinking your images. It won't help at all and will eat up your bandwith, tell them to stop it at once.