Has your website content been copied? This is what you can do

Has your masterpiece content stolen? I can empathize.

 The other day when I saw a competitors’ website ranking on 3rd position, I instantly babbled “What the heck! This website content is mine, you fool! ”. 

Digging deep into the causes of farmers’ exploitation in the Northern states of India, I developed entire website content published on my website just a week ago. And what do I see now? It is published on the other’s website without my consent and attribution! All the labour is mine, but it is published somewhere elsewhere I’m not even acknowledged as a creator of the original content. I was left heartbroken, so must be you! 

The great irony is, the internet provides you with absolutely free access to hundreds of resources and information. But the same internet would prohibit the usage of copied content while disseminating it worldwide. Search engines are responsible for this. 

Copied content is not at all good for your website or blog as the search engines give you less important in search engine rankings. Especially, when you are the original creator of the content which others scrape and attain the higher rankings and you are ranking somewhere on 13th or 14th search results page. What to do then? Perhaps, what I did to remove the copied content can work out for you.  Following are a few ways to resolve the issue. I hope this shall help! 

Detect the content portions which were copy-pasted word to word

If you are suspicious that someone is publishing your content on his website under his name, it’s time to run a quick check-up. Copy the different sections of your content and paste it on Google search query box within the inverted commas. You could see the content copied in the results. This rule has a limitation, if the copied content is not cached by crawlers yet, you can not see the results. Alternative? Try free or paid plagiarism checker tools such as Copyscape.com, Grammarly.com, Turnitin, etc. These tools obtain the complete report of all the sections plagiarised along with the sources. 

Create new content meanwhile 

Managing such legal actions can be cumbersome & time-taking for you. Because search engines count both your website and the theft website with copied content, both can be banned by search engines. While you get the issue resolved, the website can be penalized by the search engines causing you more loss of leads and business. Therefore, you must start creating new content for your website to save it from a penalty. 

Write a Cease & Desist order to the website owner

If you find the lesser parts of your content copied by someone else, I advise rewriting your content. However, if the major sections or all of your content is copied & published on other website, you can firmly write a Cease & Desist order to the website’s owner. However, you can lodge the legal request only if you have copyrights for each of the content on your website. 

A Cease & Desist order is a legal request which you can make to the website’s owner for taking down the copied content. If the owner still does not take it down, you can sue the owner for stealing the content. For this, you can simply obtain the website owner’s details form whoishostingthis or any other tool which stores the complete information of any website’s owner and send the C & D letter. You can get complete information about Cease & Desist from a legal advisor to not complicate the further issues. 

File a DMCA complaint

Before I explain what DMCA complaint or notice is, I will advise you to take this action only when some very important content of your website has been stolen and misused for commercial purposes or manipulating search engines. A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a preventive measure to stop the misuse of copyrighted work. Filing a DMCA can not only help you remove the copied content from the theft website but also it will be deleted from the database of the search engines which are displaying the copied content in its search results. Visit the official website of DMCA to know how you can lodge a legal DMCA complaint to stop the misuse of your website content.