SEO firm submits Content from Competitors site

Naturally I didn't publish the article

[alwaysthinking]

Content stealing is getting out of control!

I have a section of one of my websites that accepts articles to be published on our site for FREE, complete with author credit box & link backs to the authors' websites. It has pretty good web presense and more & more people are taking advantage of it, as a method to help increase their own web site's SERPs.

In fact, a few savvy web marketers have noticed the performance of my "sleeper" article submission service, and have been bombarding me with articles - but that's another story.

This morning I received an article submission purportedly from the CEO of a SEO firm. I couldn't BELIEVE my eyes when I read the article! I noticed that the authors name was different than that of the person that was submitting the article, and the name of the firm that the true author worked for was obviously removed from the content's introduction text.

Naturally I did a Google search on a snippet of text, and sure enough, the article was the copyright material of a fairly well known SEO web site, that was contributed by a guest writer who is a REAL SEO expert. All they did was delete the other SEO firm's name from the article... didn't even try to switch around paragraphs or reword the text to hide the fact that it was stolen intellectual property.

Naturally I didn't publish the article & I notified the SEO firm about the incident. But, how many more articles are submitted that the theives take greater care of reworking the text?

I think this was a VERY brazen act - one SEO submitting the copyrighted content of another SEO Firm. There are really some LOW LIFES in this web publishing business!

[lcampers]

i AGREE with your all-caps

[joeking]

The low life who submitted the article isn't likely to be a professional outfit - more likely a cash in merchant wanting traffic and (adsense) revenue.

I once found my content on another website with another author's name attached - in response to my complaint the website owner said "a friend" had found it on a discussion forum so thought they could use it. Yeah right.

Scumbags.

[wrockca]

thats is just nutts that someone would do that..

[poet]

A few years back, experts were advising me to write a good article and then to get multiple websites to run the article. At the bottom, the article was supposed to have a link to my site.

Are we taking the opposite approach now? Trying to prevent others from republishing our original content?

Or, are we just trying to prevent theft--the unacknowldeged publishing of our material--publishing the material without links back to the original site.

What about G's duplication filter? Will my site be penalized if someone else steals my content and runs it on his site? Or if they republish it with my permission and with a link?