What Should I do about copy cats?

[neiq]

Hello all,

I have a site that is generating income via google adsense. And now i've noticed that a guy from india has copied my site word for word. What should i do about this matter?

[tallguy]

There have been several nice forums here on how to tackle them.

[webmasterworld.com...]

I suggest u can first mail that person a polite mail,

andy

[europeforvisitors]

E-mail his hosting service and demand that the content be taken down. If that doesn't work, get the infringing pages removed from the major search engines. Here's Google's procedure for filing a complaint:

[google.com...]

[birdstuff]

IMO it's best to simply ignore it. I have a large site (5,000+ articles) with hundreds of copycat pages scattered throughout the web. My pages consistently outrank the copycats in the SERPS so I don't worry about it.

Filing a DCMA complaint could trigger all kinds of devious retribution towards your site, and if you're running AdSense it could put you out of business.

Just an opinion...

[ownerrim]

"has copied my site word for word"

How many pages is your site? I'm just trying to get a handle on to what lengths these turds will go to steal.

Google really needs to do something about this other than the dmca stuff. There should be a way for site owners to register their content as verification that their content is first and original as opposed to some ripoff cretin from china or india (no offense to anyone, but that's my impression as to where most of this *&^% is coming from)

[Jenstar]

If he is running his own AdSense, you can report him to AdSense.

IMO it's best to simply ignore it.

Google has recently bumped up their duplicate content filter, so you might run into problems there.

rogerd has an excellent post on copyright infringement on the web and what to do here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[neiq]

"How many pages is your site? " He copied about 15 pages :(. And the worst part of the entire thing is he contacted me asking me if i'm making a profit with my site and how i'm getting traffic to my site to make this profit. This really upsets me should i change my content and design?

[incrediBILL]

Yes, there are always risks when you take action, but not taking action also has risks.

I agree 100% with filing the DMCA complaints with the search engines as at least the search engines are in the US and tend to abide by US copyright laws. I would also appeal to the web host, but if the copy is hosted outside the US your chances are less that they will comply like US hosts do when DMCA emails arrive.

If you ignore it, and it gets copied again, you're more or less letting your content become public domain. Worse case the NEXT theft could occur from the current copy in India, not from your site, and proving the chain of ownership gets more muddled over time.

[tallguy]

There is a slight chance that google may detect that site as 'duplicate' and downgrade his pages since it came after yours.

[ownerrim]

"he contacted me..."

did you save the email?

[neiq]

ownerrim,
Of course i save that email.