How to provide good quality content if competition is stealing
-
Hi everyone,
I have a customer that is very successful in a worlds niche market in the aviation industry. Following Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds I tell them to provide the best content they have for their customers and want them to blog. Now the issue is that their competition is playing unfair and already stole texts from them to present those at aviation fairs.
What do you think?
How can one follow Rands and Wils suggestions without losing in the end?
Cheers
Marc
-
Go to an attorney who practices intellectual property law. You need to play your cards properly in these types of situations. What you learn from this situation can be helpful for future situations and what you establish with your attorney will streamline actions in future situations.
Discuss the following and other topics with the attorney: adequate terms of use for the website, warnings on your website for potential infringers, how others might be able to use your property under fair use, proper copyright registration, informal notices of infringement, formal notices of infringement, DMCA complaints, potential liability and costs that can be incurred if you step into this, other topics that apply to your specific situation..
An informal notice often stops infringement, a formal notice often works when informal notice does not, a DMCA can get their copy of your content out of search or off of a server. DMCA can also get you in trouble.
Legal advice in these situations often costs less than most people fear. Not taking action or taking the wrong action often costs more than most people realize.
Sometimes you can learn a lot from a preliminary discussion with an attorney by phone without incurring any costs. Depending upon your situation and who you consult, you might spend $X000 and come away with knowledge and resources that will significantly reduce your infringement problem. I've done it with more than one attorney just to get diverse perspective and an education. I've gotten my money's worth and my wallet ain't smokin'.
That's about what I can say about this. I am not qualified to give legal advice.
-
I think the hardest thing for you is to prove that the content is originally yours. I would suggest that when creating content make sure that you log the original date created and before making live inform any parties involved on the policing of your industry that the content is yours.
If the other party is simply copy and pasting for offline use it can be a bit harder to prove, but should you be able to get your hands on any hard copies that were created after your publication date you could possibly prove breach of copyrighted material, that is providing they have not simply rewrote the content to make it completely bespoke to them which again make it harder to prove they did not come up with the content.
If they are copying and pasting to their website make sure you add in a few links back to you as a source but also include any details/image with your own meta, watermarks and exif image data etc again tying it back to you. Eventually they will slip up and you will be able to prove they have been plagiarising your work.
If it is online you could also file a spam report with Google to try and get their copied content removed the serps etc. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport This may also help about copyright infrigement in the US - http://copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-infringement.html / http://www.copyright.gov/
Failing all that I would imagine a court ruling would be the final steps to stop them using your content.
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
-
Best reports for competitive social engagement insights? (Moz or not)
My client, in a large industrial sector, is trying to find or purchase good data for their industry as far as benchmarks for social engagement. While the DIY tools have social trackers, many require you to connect to the account you want to measure - so competitive research is a non-starter. What would you use to build a spreadsheet of social engagement metrics from a set of, say, 10 competitors in a niche vertical (e.g. industrial robotics?)
Social Media | | scottclark1 -
Social widgets, iFrames, Duplicate content and more...
Hi guys, I am thinking about embedding a widget on my website that pulls social content from a number of networks. The script (javascript) creates and iFrame and serves up social content which is embedded in an external page ie: Tweet --> embedded on widget-domain.com/page.html --> embedded on my-domain.com via an iFrame. Questions: 1. Will this carry any SEO benefit? Will Google see this as "fresh + frequent" content?
Social Media | | NoorHammad
2. Will this carry any SEO penalties? Will Google see this as duplicate content? I hope thats enough info to get some feedback - let me know if I can provide any more.0 -
If you post on two Twitter accounts could be rated as duplicate content
I have a personal Twitter account which is building up, but I also have a Twitter account for my holiday letting agency and until now I’ve always separated the subject of the tweets and links to my websites but I’m using Buffer which automates your tweets in advance and so I included some of the links to my business holiday letting agency articles on my personal account and people seem to like them and have shared them, but is there any risks to doing that regarding duplicate type of content? At the end of the day some the people on my personal Twitter will be interested in my agency tweets about holiday accommodation, I just want to do anything which could be termed spam.
Social Media | | persuaders0 -
PinPioneer & TumbleForce good or bad?
Hello, Surfing on a black hat forum I found a link to this software: PinPioneer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1_V38W2ElPE & TumbleForce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EdGT2UNZNkU As I saw on the videos the features are great, but I don´t know if automated link building is a good idea, I would like to know your opinion, would you use this software to generate backlinks faster though Pinterest and Tumblr? Is it a good idea to use this kind of software or should I keep my hands off this? Cheers Arnold watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1_V38W2ElPE watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EdGT2UNZNkU
Social Media | | arnoldwender0 -
How to make good content go viral?
Hi, have a question on the distribution of content which is designed to go viral. Let say you have written awesome content, with great visuals, etc which is designed to go viral. Your site is relatively new - not many social media followers, DA authority, or natural traffic. What would be a good process of distributing that content - getting the content out there so it has the best chance and ability to go viral and generate links. So far i have: Use press releases to distribute that content, using a distribution service like: prnewswire.com. Hope its picked up by a news site or something. Contact Facebook Pages or Twitter Pages who have a large audience of the type of people who would be interested in the content. Ask them if they can share the content. Content sites related to the content, and ask them to share it with their users (Give them a incentive e.g. money, a gift, etc) I think number 1 would yield the best possible results in getting actual sites linking to you. 2 and 3 are more designed for people (who very few would have blogs) to read the content. Any other suggestions, i'm missing out on? Any good articles you guys recommend, i should checkout? Thanks, Matt
Social Media | | Mattcarter080 -
Google+. Good for all businesses?
Hi guys, My question/discussion is regarding Google+ and whether or not I should advocate creating an account for one of the websites I work in-house for. This particular website focuses on unlock codes for mobile phones and isn't a service that consumers would really want to connect with - which is what Google+ appears to be a vehicle for. It is a one off purchase website, and not something people will use regularly. On the face of it Google+ offers very little for a company that operates in this fashion and makes most sense for B2B businesses. I feel that by potentially creating a Google+ presence we are in fact attempting to manipulate the search rankings because it isn't a networking site that makes sense for our business and there is actually very little real reason for us to get involved with it. I don't think Google would penalise any business for getting involved in their product, but we would only be using it to benefit our ranking position. Surely that is against everything Google themselves stand for? Also, what real benefits have you guys got out of using Google+? If I am to create a presence there, this is the ammo I'll need to use to convince my manager with. Thanks a lot.
Social Media | | purpleindigo0 -
Do keywords in a URL that's linkified provide anchor text benefits?
I'm curious about links that are just URLs (e.g. http://www.google.com/reader) or in a URL-like format (e.g. Google.com/Reader) vs links with plain-word anchor text (e.g. Google Reader). If a link that is just a URL (or a partial URL) has keywords in it, do those keywords provide anchor text relevance benefits? I'm particularly thinking about URL shorteners that provide customized links, and social media. Many web tools (twitter, blog comment systems) don't render HTML but will automatically link URLs. If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/ gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9?
Social Media | | Jay.Neely0