Question:

I needed your expert and urgent opinion on this issue I am facing. I have a successful website well-optimized that ranks in the top 3 on most of the big search engines for various keywords that I am interested in. Earlier I noticed 2 copycat sites that were almost exact replicas of my own. This of course was done in view of trying to achieve the same success that my website had achieved. I immediately emailed the website owners, with warnings that they would be reported to the search engines, their web host and ISP. They immediately took their websites down. This time though there is a particular person that has not responded to my emails and continues to keep his website live which is a blatant copy of my own. His ISP has ignored my emails too and I'm getting really worried now. Please advice what should I do in this matter?

Dominic Smithson

Answer:

Hi Dominic,

What you are facing is also affecting many other search engine optimization experts who rank highly on the search engine result pages, and then find their work stolen word for word, image for image and tag for tag. These duplicated websites are created within minutes if not hours with the aim of replicating the same successful results that the high ranked websites achieved. Sometimes if you check your web site logs you will even notice a particular user or IP having browsed through all the pages of your website within minutes. This can give you an indication that someone has saved all the content from your website. Normally though, most webmasters know their site has been copied in whole or part from back-links they find at the search engines. These back-links are left mistakenly by the plagiarists. Sometimes, you will come to know of this by monitoring your server logs and seeing visitors coming to your site from the links left mistakenly by the plagiarists.

In my personal experience, about 2 years ago, just about all the pages present in our site had been copied by a competitor of ours who conveniently changed all instances of my name in those pages to his own name and left everything else exactly the same. I got to know of this site because the plagiarist had mistakenly left some links that were pointing to our site and visitors from those links started appearing in our server logs. I sent an email to his web host asking that the site be removed and got no response. 2 weeks later, I sent another email to the web host and this time, I threatened the web host with a lawsuit. I got a reply within a few hours saying that he had not received my first email and that he had taken down the competitor's site.

Anyway, now that you have seen your website content has been copied you can file for copyright infringement. You must first collect all evidence to support your case. Screen shots of both websites, email correspondence, information regarding the web host, Domain Name Registrant information etc… must all be recorded to among other things, help determine the actual plagiarist.

Just a bit of good news: Simply copying a web site will not help that person get good rankings. Almost every search engine uses link popularity to rank web sites, and link popularity is specific to each site - it cannot be copied by another site. For them to achieve the amount of success that your website currently revels in, they would need to put in the same hard work that you have put in and collect incoming links from other sites. The bigger worry that should concern you is that some search engines might see the duplicate content and penalize one or both of the sites. This way your site may get penalized in the process for no fault of yours.

To combat this issue, you should immediately write to each search engine, especially those search engines which have spidered the copied website, and inform them about the problem. Google actively and seriously deals with complaints they receive about any infringement that is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You can find more about how to correspond with Google regarding this matter on their website at:

http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Do remember they prefer not to be contacted via email in regard to this matter. More details are available on the URL mentioned above.

Next, contact your lawyer and ask him/her to send a legal notice (a Cease & Desist letter) to the web site owner as well as the web host with a copy to the concerned search engines. You will receive automated email replies from the search engines, usually indicating that your email has been received followed by custom replies, all of which you can save and forward to the person accused. Seeing your professional and thorough approach he or she will in most cases drop the copied website and reply back to you apologizing for the same. If that doesn't work, you will probably have to ask your lawyer to file a lawsuit against this person and the web host.