You're working hard to improve your website, rank higher in Google, and get
good traffic. You feel pretty good about all things digital then all of a sudden...
BAM! You find a copied version of your website or a crucial piece of content. So
what do you do? Do you contact a lawyer? Do you rewrite your content? Or do you punch
one of your computer monitors?
Today, we're going to answer these questions as
we dive into what to do when your website content gets stolen. First off, I
totally get that angry reaction when you first see another site that's copied
your content word-for-word or stolen your site's design and added their own
content to it. It's super frustrating and discouraging and I've been in your shoes
many times. Fortunately I've got some good advice here on how to handle it.
We're going to go over three options today of how to approach this issue, and
no, punching your monitor is not one of them. To start, one approach is the legal
action approach. Before we start... disclaimer...I'm certainly not a lawyer
and this is not legal advice. If you've taken the steps to have your website
copyrighted you could work with an intellectual property law firm to pursue
legal action against somebody who has stolen your site's design or content.
Getting your content copyrighted is a big process that can take a while but
once that's done, a knowledgeable and reputable IP law firm can help out with
the next steps. If your design or content is proprietary in nature, this can be a
good step, but in general, I don't recommend going with this option for a
few reasons. It can be very time-consuming and expensive to
copyright your site and pursue legal action. The website you're trying to take
action on might be difficult to track down, and you can end up investing a lot
of time and money with little results. That said, this can be a good option if
your circumstances dictate it. A second option is to take a couple of quick
steps to lessen the impact that stolen website content has on your site without
needing legal action. To do this, I recommend filing a DMCA claim with
Google. This can be done in just a few minutes and lets Google know that
somebody has stolen your content and you want that site removed from Google's
index. Google typically takes very quick action on these and it can help
alleviate any potential impact in search. Another thing you can do is
contact the offending site's web host and file a complaint with them. Hosting
companies don't like it when people host stolen content on their servers, and I've
personally had very good luck getting sites taken down who are in violation by
sending a nice email to their web host along with some proof of the stolen
content. There are a few quick ways to figure out who's hosting a particular
website that has your stolen content on it. One of the easiest ways is to go to
whoishostingthis.com or Google who's hosting this and you can use a tool to
drop in their website URL and it will spit back who's hosting that website. The
final option is a strange one but in a lot of circumstances is the right one. Do
nothing. Yes, it's challenging to bottle up all of
that anger and then sit on your hands, but the facts are that website content
design and images are stolen millions of times per day and there's very little
that you can do about it. Google has gotten really great at
determining who the original creator of a piece of content is and then giving
them proper credit in search results so it's very rare nowadays that a copied
website can negatively impact you in search. As I mentioned before, it can be
challenging to track down who's behind a site with stolen content, so your time
may be better spent continuing to make your site more amazing so that more
people will want to steal your content. Having your content stolen is a side
effect of having a popular, well- trafficked website nowadays. Ultimately,
it is up to you on how you want to approach things when this happens, but
these three strategies should help guide you in the right direction for your
business.