I got a good tip from Michael James on how he finds folks that have been stealing his content and passing it off as their own, and it really is quite simple.
- Find one of your old posts and copy a sentence from the middle of the article
- Go to google (or whatever search engine you like) and paste the phrase into the search phrase (if you want to be even more clever, you can enclose the phrase in quotes, so you are looking for an exact match).
- Voila, you will see if there is anyone out there passing your good works off as their own stuff.
You then need to have a standard DCMA infringement e-mail that you will then want to send to the alleged perpetrator (and maybe copy Google if you wish) asking them to take the content down. It seems to have worked well for Michael James, I have yet to find anyone who has “stolen” any of my content, but I will keep looking.
You wrote it, you should be the one to profit from it.
Image courtesy of chanpipat at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Nice tip, Big! This post will be very useful to those writers or blogger that are very known and in demand these days. Content thieves will be terrified and they will surely stop doing it if you will do or use the steps from 1 to 3. I think this must be shared to other webpages, so that they will be alarmed. Thanks for this. Such a good tip!
I found this post shared on Kingged.com, the IM social networking site, and I “kingged” it and left this comment.
Better yet, copy a sentence from the beginning of the article. On a lot of the cheap scraper sites, the article page won’t even show up, but a more visible page with summaries of articles (often including the first couple sentences) will show up. I am going through this process to find domains to disavow for Google, and most of the finds are scraper sites that have disabled the links.