A few months ago on a Sunday morning, I was looking through my emails when I discovered a bunch of new Google Alerts in my inbox. For all of you who are unfamiliar with Google Alerts, Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. As an online shop owner, I keep track of the competition for all of my main keywords using Google Alerts which tells me when new websites are indexed that pertain to my industry.

Once a week (or whenever Google sends me email), I do a cursory scan of the wedding linens competitive landscape. While most of the new webpages that pop up are from Etsy or Ebay (which I ignore), this time out of the corner of my eye, I happened to notice some content that looked really familiar.

When I clicked on the email and read the verbiage, it was without a doubt my handwriting (I can recognize my writing style). Someone had completely and blatantly ripped off content from our online store.

When I clicked on the link to visit the site, I saw that a good portion of our product photos and our arts and crafts pages were copied word for word. The webmaster didn’t even bother to change any of the content. It was blatant stealing! In some cases, he didn’t even bother to copy the image and was hotlinking it straight off my site and stealing my bandwidth as well.

The Kicker

As I sat there in front of my computer screen fuming, I also noticed an email from the rogue webmaster asking me if I wanted to purchase his products wholesale for our online store!!! He had some nerve! Not only did he rip off all of our product photos and steal our arts and crafts content but he now expected us to add him on as a new supplier?!? No way in hell!

The crazy thing was that he pointed out in the email that the products he carried were identical to the ones that we sold in our store and told us to look at the photos carefully just to make sure. Well f#$%…those are our product photos so how can I trust you?

My First Reaction

At first, I was so pissed off that I didn’t know what to do. I went through the entire site and flagged all of the cases of duplicate content and listed them in an email. Then I wrote a terse but polite email to the webmaster.

To whom it may concern,

Please take down all of the arts and crafts pages from your website as you have blatantly copied both our pictures and content. I have listed the following links in violation below.

(long list of links)

Steve

Three days passed and nothing happened, so I decided to escalate the situation a bit.

Filing A DMCA Complaint

The nice thing about monopolies is that you only have to go to a single source in order to file a complaint. Via an easy to use web form, Google allows you to report content that you believe warrants removal from Google’s services based on applicable laws. In my case, the violation was a blatant theft of content. I’ve listed the link below in case you ever have to file a complaint.


It’s not a lengthy process to file a complaint by any means, but I wanted to give the webmaster one last chance to remove the infringing content on his own volition so I sent another email.

To whom it may concern,

If the infringing content on your website is not removed in the next few days, I will have no choice but to file a formal DCMA complaint with Google.

http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Please take down the copied content ASAP.

Steve

The DMCA threat did the trick and within a day, all of the content was removed.

Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is not just useful for managing your online reputation. It also works well for keeping track of your competition and in this case, catching rogue webmasters who are stealing your content. I set up my Google Alerts to send me email on a weekly basis and I keep tabs of any mention of our store as well as new competitors which match our primary product keywords.

90% of the time, I don’t have to take any action at all. But Google Alerts allows me to keep track of new entrants into our niche and to address any negative press about our company online. Literally, it just takes a few minutes to setup and you are good to go.

Prevent Hotlinking Of Your Images

It’s one thing for someone to steal your content but it’s another matter if someone steals your bandwidth. I currently have bandwidth limits imposed on all of my websites. If I exceed this bandwidth allotment, I get charged a significant penalty.

In this case, I could have disabled hotlinking altogether on my server in order to prevent bandwidth theft. Here’s how to prevent hotlinking by adding a few lines to your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ – [F]

Conclusion

Getting blatantly ripped off is probably not the end of the world but it sure is annoying. Realistically, Google should catch duplicate content and penalize it accordingly but why take the chance? You should use Google Alerts to keep track of your competition, your reputation and any rogue activity.

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