Today I read a post on blogging sub-reddit which asking what should your or I do, when other bloggers copied contents from your blog? Even worse, those sites which stole your content ranks higher on Google search result page.
Here’s some actions you can do to fight back.
Contact the site owner
The easiest one is to contact the site owner through email address (if you can find it) or any other means you find. Ask him/her/them to remove the copied content from their site.
There were several cases where the site owner isn’t the site administrator. There are many site owner or bloggers who have team members (and even outsource service) to create and manage content on their site.
So, explains to the owner, send some factual and credible evidence about the copied content and the original one that’s been up on your site or blog, long before it’s copied.
This can be the fastest and most effective way if the owner has good intention and agree to remove the copied contents from their site.
Report to Google DMCA service
Here’s the link. You can follow the steps there, to report the sites which copied your content.
If you can give solid proof to Google that you’re the original creator of the content, the copied content will be removed from Google search result page and anywhere else you report to Google.
Unfortunately, this is just removing it from Google services. On other search engine services like DuckDuckGo or Bing, the copied contents will be there.
Yes, this step is only for Google. For other services, you’ll have to report to them separately.
Report to its web host provider
In my opinion, this is the most effective way compared the other two. But, you have to figure out what is the site web host provider, where is it hosted at? Here’s how:
scroll down there, look at the “host info for…” section, which includes the web host details
Once you know the web host provider details, you can make an attempt to report the sites that copied your content to them. Most of web host providers take this very seriously as it has direct effect to their reputation as a good web hosting company.
Take legal action
Only do this if you have enough financial resources to fight it on the court. This could be long and hard battle on the court. Your opponent can fight back at you too. So, be sure you have enough resources, both financial, mental, and your time.
Conclusion
For most cases, the best way to take down the stolen content is reporting to the web host provider where the site is hosted at. If the site is hosted on a dedicated server or on its own server, you can report it to the server’s provider as well.