My site was copied for adsense gain. Not any more!

Feather in the cap of the white hat, hard working webmaster

[Sense_able]

I just had to share this experience with someone. I have always had a niche which I have been earning a great Adsense income from.

About 12 months ago I started to see a decline on the amount of search engine traffic that I was getting from Google and therefore loss of adsense income. I searched and searched for an answer until about 3 months ago I found a site that had completely copied ALL of my site and was displaying his own adsense ads on the copy of my site.

I was furious and emailed the owner of the site (No Reply) Then I went through the process recommended at copyscape and I emailed the host where the site was hosted (No joy there) So I filed a DMCA Complaint to Google.

I have waited about 3 weeks and I am delighted to see the offending site removed from Google with the following message instead of his listings

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed <snip> from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

This person was just ripping off my content for his own gains with Adsense. He was very quick to remove his adsense code when I wrote to him. (Even though he did not reply).

I just wanted you all to know that the system works, for once the good guys win and this is a feather in the cap of the white hat, hard working webmaster.

May the DMCA rule forever, and a word of warning to all of you keep checking with copyscape.

[bts111]

Nice Work!

[Garfieldt]

allright! congratulations on a job well done

[december angel]

This is my first post but I’ve been impressed by the generous advice given to others – so here’s hoping!

Interested in your experiences Sense-able. We have a similar situation but with several sites totally copied. They’re up for months and rank on google search way above us (it gave us some small traffic). They also have Adsense.

We emailed them and the sites came down, but now weeks later they’re up again.

What should we do – some concerns.
A DMCA complaint to google etc but what are the downsides to this. We are surprised that only 4 google complaints are showing on Chilling Effects for Jan 06– is that cos there is some prob. about making this type of complaint. (it seems to us there is rampant copying going on out there - we see many paragraphs of our text on other sites. We also notice one site complained of months ago is still using the same adsense code.

Any help would be appreciated.

[WallyWorld]

Angel, if you have filed with the U.S. Copyright office for any of the pages and the perp is in the U.S. you should contact a copyright attorney. You then won't need to prove damages. There is an automtic damages amount that can be collected and any copyright attorney should be able to get a 5 figure settlement for you.

[december angel]

re copying of websites

thank you for that WallyWorld

yes! we should have filed with the US copyright office (since your post, we have read it up and plan to do that now to at least some of our sites*). We are in europe and the copied sites are in europe/asia but i think both countries have an agreement wiht the US from what i read

we are pretty unknowledgeable about all that goes on and didn't anticipate some would copy the total site!

we most want to get all the copied sites down out of google search so i suppose the DMCA notice to google should be effective as per Sens-able's post.

it's just we are wondering is there any problem doing that as so few people seem to do it.

*we have a load of individual sites; the copier used subdomains for each site

thank you again for your advice