How to fight against a site always "re-write" your content?

[JonnyGreenwood]

A site is always copying our content then re-write to their site, how to fight against this kind of action?

(Many of those copied content can get a rank very closely behind us, which will grab some of our visits )

I tried to find DMCA, but as they have changed some paragraphes, etc, DMCA can't punish them as copying.

I think many of you also have met such a problem, how will you handle this situation??

[Chris.Menke]

Try disallowing the user agent in your robots.txt file and pinning down the IP address of the scraper so you can deny it in your .htaccess file

[JonnyGreenwood]

Thanks for your reply.

I newly added the rel=canonical tag days ago, and I will spread our posts on social networks once we published it.

Hope it will works, Google wrongly gives them authority in my opinion.

[TomRayner]

Hi Jonny

If I were you, I would use a rel=canonical tag solution, so that every page (and new page) has a canonical tag on it.

Among other things, this will tell Google that your site is the originator of this content.  Any other  versions of it on your site or across the web is being used purely for user experience and therefore should not be ranked over the original.

As you will be publishing the content first, it should be crawled first by the search engines as well.  To ensure that it is, I would also share your pages on social media when they go live, as it helps to index the pages much quicker.

This way, the site scraping your content should (in theory) not be able to rank for the content - or at the very least will be seen by Google as the copier of the content, while you will be seen as the originator, due to being indexed first with the canonical tag.

You can read more on canonicals with this handy Moz guide.

Hope this helps.

[JonnyGreenwood]

I tried to contact them via contact us form, but no reply.

Then I wanted to contact their host provider directly, but they are hidden behind proxy, obviously, they are just aiming at stealing contents from others.

[underscorelive]

My first piece of advice would be to appeal to their human side - state your case that it's your hard work they're stealing and that duplicate content may actually hurt both of your rankings.

If that doesn't work which I expect it wont, dend a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter, you'll find some templates here:

http://minnesotaattorney.com/cease-desist-letter-template-example-sample-forms/

Ensure all of your content has a clear copyright mark.

Use the letter to make the point that legal action may be taken if they do not stop.

good luck!