Our content has been stolen
-
We've a new intern who spent a good few hours writing this article http://appointedd.com/blog/nominees-for-the-british-hairdresser-of-the-year-2013-announced/ - quite a good we one feel.
Our main competitor has taken almost the entire thing word for word and put in up on their blog http://www.inaa.com/apiblog/?p=821
While this is a foolish move on their part, we're still quite offended over the incident as this was the intern's forst article and she'll be looking to add it to her portfolio.
I was wondering what the best practice is in this situation? Is simply writing to them enough if they've demonstrated they're underhanded? Should we call them out on it? I'm simply unsure as I want to protect no only the business but the intern also.
thanks!
-
As someone who worked as a professional journalist for almost fifteen years, I can attest to what an enormously widespread problem this is. I've heard of cases where individuals have had remarkable success simply by sending a cease and desist order to the offending company. I.e. the scare tactics work. There are some really great suggestions above, too, on how to accomplish this. Hope it works out!
-
Looks like you are in the UK ...
1. Copyright/ DMCA Takedown Process
Copyright laws differ country to country, but in the USA the minute she wrote the article (not posted it ... actually wrote it and gave her ideas a tangible form) she owned the copyrights.
Showing proof of that -- and the timeframe -- should not be too hard. (email, draft doc. etc.)
In the US, we have something called a DMCA takedown letter. You write a letter to the infringing site's ISP documenting the proof, and the content gets taken down.
( In the UK, is there the equivalent to the US DMCA take down procedure)?
This is how we do it in the US:
2. Social Media Peer Pressure:
If you are active in social media ... don't underestimate the impact of peer pressure. We wrote about this recently ... might be a good approach , it certainly is used to good effect here.
You publicly out them and have your social community apply some peer pressure to the infringer. Here is an example:
http://info.icopyright.com/internet-piracy/fighting-online-content-theft-peer-pressure-can-work
Hope these links help.
-
Thanks for all the feedback guys - really appreciated!
-
you might want to remove (or break) that url to you competitor stolen article as this forum is crawled too...
-
Get some back links to that post as quickly as you can, even if it is bookmarking or social sharing.
As a rule you want to always get the content indexed on your site first prior to it released via syndication or worse (in this situation) scrapped by another site.
-
I would ask them to remove it. If they won't, fill this out once indexed: Report alleged copyright infringement: Web Search.
Any other tips for Philip?
.
-
Yeah, blog is going through a restructure today and new sitemap submitted tomorrow. Went up on G+ yesterday when it was posted I believe.
Thanks though.
-
The article is not even indexed yet on either site.
Get it indexed on your blog first, share it on Google+ might help this happen.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain Transition: Leaving low quality content behind
We're in the initial stages of planning a domain transition / rebrand. We're considering 301'ing our low and high(er) quality content split to two different domains. One for the low quality, one for our high. Best practices normally tell you to not split your content between between multiple domains. However, what if the majority of pages on your site are thin/outdated, and attract low volume/long tail? Does it make sense to bring that low quality/volume content over the new domain, when you know you'll never have the resources (nor would it make sense to) mass improve the quality of these pages? I'm concerned the quality of these pages are affecting our overall domain authority. Some background on our site/business: Current site has 15,000+ pages. 98% of our site is a product directory of professional/enterprise business management software. While a small handful of our product pages have quality original long form content (maybe 50-100), most of the product pages are a combination of: thin, outdated, overly sales-y content provided directly from product developers, and/or catch only very low-volume/long tail organic traffic. 95% of our pages attract fewer than 20 visits/mo, 90% of our pages attract fewer than 10 visits/mo. We have a small business of about 10 employees. Most of which don't maintain our site. It's unrealistic for us to genuinely improve the quality of that many pages. Nor does it make sense to improve most of these pages, as they'll attract only very low volume keywords. Individually these low quality pages don't bring in many customers, but on aggregate they do. 70% of our organic conversions come from pages with less than 20 visits/mo. A few questions: Is this content negatively affecting our domain authority in any way? While I don't believe we've been hit with a penalty, Google knows that on average our pages aren't very helpful to many users, and I'm concerned that affects our ability to rank with pages that matter. None of the content was mass produced in any form of scraping efforts or anything nefarious like that. Would there be any negative/positive affect to offloading these low quality/volume pages to a different domain during the rebrand?
Branding | | dsbud0 -
Is my content strategy focusing on the best vertical?
Help Mozzers! I've been struggling to find a solid content and posting (social media) strategy. This particular client has an ecommerce website within the home and garden industry. Her products include: screen magnets window hangers outdoor metal art switchplates (outlet covers) The recent content I've been posting is DIY related home decor ideas. I would love some ideas on niches or verticals I can tap into. The audience is female dominant, ages 35-65+. I'm wondering if I should stay within home decor and trying to work the products in, or there is another vertical my mind is blanking over. Thanks for the help Mozzers!
Branding | | localwork0 -
Unpublishing content question
Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles. We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions: 1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles? 2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?
Branding | | TheaterMania0 -
Hosted content vs Dedicated website (for large piece of content)
There is one question that keep bugging us and for which we are looking for a logical answer – to put it short, in which context(s) is it preferable to publish original content on a company website vs on a dedicated external platform with its own URL? To give a little more details: we an education company that provides languages course abroad and that functions like a specialised travel agency. Each trip is very specific – it depends on people's language level, objectives, budget, etc. – so we provide tailor-made advice for each of our students. Our site is not an e-commerce site, and a typical call-to-action is a request for a 1-to-1 interview with one of our agents, or a quote request for a language trip project. The top conversion for us is an enrolment for a language course abroad. We have a corporate websites structure where we have 1 website per locale where we operate, which means 14 websites in 7 different languages. We produce smaller pieces of content for these websites in a dedicated section – the rest of the website being mostly a presentation of our products, services and destinations – but here we intend to create a very large Quiz which will be based on multiple audio files. The content will be translated into multiple languages (likely 10 different languages) and will require some rather heavy development. We intend to add sections for scoreboards, stats, a log-in section (probably Facebook), etc. This sounds to us like something we should host on a specific URL, but then how can we make the most of the SEO benefits that we will (hopefully) get with such content? We plan to have an about section where we explain a little bit who we are, where we will probably link back to our corporate websites, but of course we want our project to live for itself and to be as far from commercial as possible – while still making the most of the SEO benefits. How can we do this in the most subtle / logical way? Would it be better to host our Quiz on our corporate domains? Thanks in advance for your advice. Maëlle
Branding | | ESL_Education0 -
Linkedin: Inshares - Can I see who inshared my content?
Hi All, Just wondering... since the demise of Linkedins' Signal tool, is there a way to actually see who and where my content is being shared on Linkedin? Blog posts being published at the minute are getting inshares almost as soon as they're live and I want to know who's doing it. Any advice would be appreciated.
Branding | | SanjidaKazi1 -
Advice on Content Publishing
Hi, I was rather hoping for a little advice on how to best get my content out there. I made a simple, and pretty poor quality (though funny I hope), guide on making homemade slippers for Father's Day - you can find it here http://appointedd.com/blog/homemade-slippers-for-fathers-day/ I guess my question would be, where would you put it up? Being fairly new to this kind of content creation (and this was only something I did in my spare time), I'm still trying to get my head around some of it. thanks!
Branding | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Content Marketing for E-Commerce Sites
Let's have a real discussion about content marketing for B2B and B2C e-commerce sites. As an SEO/inbound marketer (these days, I'm not sure what to call myself other than my first name), it's part of my job to keep a pulse on what's going on in the online marketing community. My daily routine starts with checking several sites for news/discussion (Moz, Inbound.org, SearchEngineLand, etc). Anyone actively involved in the community knows the word "content" appears in more articles than any other word (ok, maybe there a few others). Want to increase brand awareness? Generate content. Want to drive more traffic to your site? Generate content. Want to build quality links? Generate content. Want to discover the Higgs particle before the physicists? Generate content (and distribute to the right audience, so not to the chemists - ok maybe to the chemists, they're a related audience). Content, content, content, we're told! Yes I did see the Rand's WBF from a couple months back about content-less marketing, but frankly his suggestions fall under the traditional model of advertising and word-of-mouth. We're online marketers baby, we're expanding and changing the traditional model - with content! Enough of content marketing about content marketing. Let's see some content marketing for the small B2C, mom n' pop client who sells gardening tools. Let's see the amazing infographic you made for your local pizzeria client that drove traffic to their site. Let's see the Q+A discussion thread you identified and contributed to as means to display 'market leadership' in your niche of home air purifiers. Look, I love the idea of content marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Displaying market leadership by answering questions and offering something beneficial to your target audience should be the way to grow business (along with having a good product/service, I guess). But it's much easier said than done. And to be clear, I never expected otherwise. The motivation for this post was to start a discussion about real-world, applied content marketing, not content marketing about content marketing. Let the conversation begin.
Branding | | b40040400 -
Has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Can I protect the content but dump the face on the SERPS?
Hi, Is there a way to get the benefits of rel=author for protecting site content but to disconnect that from the face photo on the SERPS? We added rel=author to our unique and individually written product descriptions and reviews. This has led to a decrease in click thru thus far. I suspect this is because when searching for a product to buy the user sees the face and thinks "review" or at least "not corporate". I don't nec. want to dump rel=author in the sea yet for our ecom pages, has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Four our keywords, we are the only company of 10 well known travel sites that have the face in the SERPS, far from improving our CTR, it has trashed it. Any ideas?
Branding | | xoffie0