Real Estate Blog - I won a small victory against a plagiarizer

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I won a small victory against a plagiarizer - thanks, Google!

This is an update to a post I did in mid-August about a scraping blog from the Czech Republic stealing 3 of my posts from my outside blog.

I filed a DMCA complaint with Google, carefully following the specific procedure for doing so.

Since the site wasn't located in the U.S. my only option was to complain to Google because it's one of those sites setup solely to earn income from Google Adsense. The site contains ONLY stolen material.

In addition to filing the DMCA complaint, I also emailed many of the other people who had content stolen to advise them of the situation with info on how to file a complaint.

Recently, I received an email from Google saying that while they did not have authority to take down the site, they had blocked my 3 articles from being searchable by Google. They said they would also record the offense in ChillingEffects.org.

So now, when I enter the domain name of the offending site into a Google search, this copy shows up in fairly large letters, at the bottom of each of the 20-some pages ...

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Then if someone clicks on the ChillingEffects link, they see the following copy, (protected somewhat since I'm an individual):

Notice Unavailable
DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Google
The notice is not available.

Chilling Effects serves as a clearinghouse for cease-and-desist notices. Chilling Effects is not the sender of these notices, and is not responsible for removing pages from the web or search engine listings. If you believe a web page or site was wrongly removed, you should contact the ISP or search engine who removed the site. In the case of an improper DMCA notification, you may wish to file a counter-notification.

While my articles are still posted on the offending site, at least they're not generating Google Juice. It's a small victory, but at least a victory.

BTW, I recommend visiting ChillingEffects database to see all the cease & desist complaints filed - mostly to Google. A lot of them targeted bloggers who used plagiarized material. It's an interesting read.

Maybe it will put a little fear into some of the plagiarizers on ActiveRain.

Posted by Elaine Reese, REALTOR® in central Ohio on 10/11/2007 11:09 PM

Comments (38)

google, plagiarism

38 Comments on I won a small victory against a plagiarizer - thanks, Google!

OCT

2007

Elaine - High Five! What an inspiration for anyone else who has this happen to them. Glad to hear you are taking down the bad guys!

Glad to hear that you had a vicotyr no matter how small. It is sad that you will lose the content in the engines but better than being banned all together.

Ashley, I got my inspiration from Lenn! It should let others know that we can FIGHT BACK!

Elaine: This is wonderful news--and should probably be a featured post. Congratulations--and thanks.

Good job Elaine. There are no small victories.

Joe - it doesn't affect MY posted articles, just the offending site. For instance, one of the posts mentions "ground hogs". So if someone searches for that term, my article will still show up in the search, but the offending site won't show. But that only applies for Google searches.

Roberta: Yes, it's nice to know that Google does work for the "little people".

Featured Post???? After reading Brian's post, do we still have those?

This is interesting Elaine. I have to admit, I wouldn't even know how to find the information of anyone stealing content. How do you know? How did you find out? I'm glad you you got some action!

Fran: I guess a victory with Google by an individual is kinda a big thing.

I have not had to do that yet. Hopefully I won't. I will link bookmark that link in case. Thank you for sharing that with the group.

Deborah: I found it by running a CopyScape search. Simpy go to CopyScape.com and enter your URL's. CopyScape will check the words you have on your blog or web site then it will search for those same words or phrases on other sites.

It may find just phrases with links to the original content. Some directories do this and that is permitted by copyright law. But the site I found had copied the entire article - complete with my photos - and my "this is copyrighted" language at the bottom. They give no credit to the original author.

The site has set up to scrap all WordPress articles with a tag of "landscape" and the site is billing themselves as a landscape design site. So I've changed my articles on WP from using that landscape tag.

Randy, have you ever run CopyScape for your blog? You might be surprised at what you find.

By the way, I've never had CopyScape work for my ActiveRain blog posts. It's probably because our blogs aren't primary.

I am glad to hear of this news. It sometimes takes effort to win. Good Job!

Gary: Effort and persistency!

So, somebody explain something to me, . . . . Google does not have the sense to 'blackball' the offending site from the Google search results?! Is there something I do not understand here? The copywrite violations is fairly indisputable, is it not?

That is absolutely awesome that Google nailed them.. of all people!

Good Work Elaine!

OCT

2007

Thanks so much Elaine! Your reply is much appreciated - there is so much to learn! I am bookmarking for future reference.

Have a great weekend

Dwight: It's like the movie "Follow the Money". The offending site is using AdSense so the site earns money and so does Google. The site has well over 20 Google pages for just its domain name. That means lots of opportunity to bill the people paying for Google Ads views.

If you go to the August article I wrote, I have links to my articles on the offending site as well as my own. No question that they've stolen the articles ... as well as all the other articles on the site.

The site is a privately hosted WordPress site which WP said they couldn't do anything about either.

Daniel: Keep this in mind if you ever run into trouble.

Deborah: Your welcome.

I'm glad you had the persistence and diligence to follow up on this. They're lucky The Murph didn't have to get involved! And it's great to see Google being so responsive to an individual blogger. Thanks for sharing your victory!

Wow! Way cool, Elaine. Way to go!!!

Hi Elaine: I really must live in a cave. I had no idea this stuff was going on. Perhaps now that I have bee on Active Rain for going on two months, it sounds like this would be something I need to pay attention to.

Just curious here. What effect does someone in the Czech Republic stealing your posts have on you personally ? How does it damage you ? I would like to know... just so I can be on the lookout personally. I just signed up for an outside blog, and will soon be up and running... so I guess I should "Czech" this out.

I am guessing that Google did not "blackball" the offending site due to litigation concerns. But, then again, if anyone has the money to fight off potential litigation... it would have to be Google ! Great post, Elaine. Thanks for sharing.

John: I was a little surprised that Goggle responded to an individual as well. I received several emails from them during the course of this, and they were from "real" people writing "real" emails. The Murph was ready to take over if I needed him!

Rich: I'm working my way up to be like Lenn ... but she gets money!

Karen: The effect these people have on us personally is the Google Juice they steal away from the original authors. These type of sites tend to be set up very well in their SEO design so they have high PageRank and come up on the first page of the search engines. Now, assume there is one that has been set up to scrape all blog posts on Fort Worth. Now assume a potential client conducts a Google search for Fort Worth real estate. The potential client might click on THEIR article (that YOU wrote) because it's on page 1 and your blog is on page 2. They just stole that potential client's eyeballs that otherwise might have landed on your blog instead.

If they weren't allowed to exist, your article on Fort Worth real estate might have been the one to be on Page 1.

These sites are set up to automatically scrape the articles of others, and generate their income when people click on the Google Ads. They have no interaction with their readers. On all three of my articles, I've put in their comment section that the article has been plagiarized, etc. I thought they would delete my comment but they haven't, which tells me that no eyeballs are watching what is said.

If the site were located in the U.S. then I could have gone to the blog host to require them to remove my articles based on the DMCA laws. But outside the U.S., there's really not much we can do. That's why WordPress couldn't help.

One of the people that helped me was the guy who writes www.plagiarismtoday.com blog. He found the article I wrote on WordPress about this subject, and contacted me.

Since you're fairly new, keep this in mind if you're considering writing very personal stuff or including photos of your family. I never include photos of my kids - except for The Murph. The reason I was so upset was that I didn't follow my own advice and used a photo of my Mom. That happened to be one of the posts they scraped.

You and Jay Thompson are my idols now when it comes to fighting this stuff!

I have just basically pulled the covers up over my head and hoped it would all go away.

Maureen, you work so hard on your SEO, I would think you would want to protect it by not allowing others to benefit from your articles.

I don't work hard on SEO at all. I just keep consistantly adding content to my blogs. The wrestling with the WP.org and RT platforms is really the extent of the hard work.

It upsets me that they benefit but do these sites hurt your SEO? I have not seen evidence of them usurping any juice from my blogs. I still thought it would and got the wrong answer on the SEOmoz quiz:

#64 Duplicate content is primarily an off-site issue, created through content licensing deals and copyright violations of scraped and re-published content, rather than a site-internal problem.
Your Answer: TRUE
Correct Answer: FALSE
The answer is FALSE, as on-site duplicate content issues can be serious and cause plenty of problems in the search engines.

Or am I misunderstanding this question? I think it is wrong that these sites scrape content. I hate my content being used by others to get money on ads but I have never decided to spend the time and energy on it. I just write another entry....

I don't think it hurts my SEO or does it?

Maureen, for the site that stole my content, they have stolen many, many articles from two legitimate landscape design firms. When I do a search on the offender's domain name, they have 320 entries that are indexed by Google. The site has a page rank of 5. A lot of those 320 entries mention the name of the real design firms in the text description.

So with that kind of Google authority, there's little chance of the real design firms ever being found by a potential client because they'll be so far back in the pages that they're not likely to be found,

It's like Lenn complaining about having to compete with the lead generators ... only 100 times worse. The lead generaters for real estate may only take up one or two spots on Google. These scrapers take up dozens or more.

OCT

2007

Elaine -all I can say is OMG. I found your post from your comment on another post (the usual AR thing), but it just shows that I don't know much about blogging. If Google makes money from these people, why would they be interested in interfering? re: your comment on another post: do I need to learn HTML to have a Wordpress. org blog? Thanks.

Faina: Regarding the money Google makes, that's the problem. These sites make money from Google and Google makes money from the people who pay for Google Adsense. The ones getting screwed are the foolish people who do pay-per-click (PPC) on Google Adsense.

Now go study up on your html. ;-)

OCT

2007

Elaine - I remember when this started - thanks for the education and happy to see some justice. I'm finding my blog "scraped" by dummie sites at least 10 times a day - it's so icky and frustrating and they try to trackback to me - NOT!

Hi Elaine: It amazes me when I re-visit a blogtger here on Active Rain, and start reading the post. Then, when I notice right away that the post could NOT have been written by this person, I am again very surprised. I still don't get it. Any, thanks for trying to keep people on the straight and narrow.

Elaine, and Cyndee... (waving). I thought I would share a short story. Years ago... perhaps 1996 when I joined AOL... I was just getting acquainted with email. When the first emails started coming in, I was horrified. As they came in, one by one, I deleted them... without reading them. I thought is was such an awful thing. I remember a friend who was more computer savvy asked my why I was upset. I told her... every single email I get is labelled as "hate mail." I am even afraid to open them, so I just delete them.

So... my friend looked at my emails... and there it was... hate mail... right at the end of every email. Only, they did not spell out hate mail. They abbreviated it... html. My friend almost fell on the floor laughing. I thought html meant it was "hate mail." Duh. Thanks for letting me share. :) I think I may go and make an entire post out of this. :)

Cyndee: yesterday, thanks to Google Alerts, I found a legitimate blog that was referencing (and linked) to an article I wrote. They did it OK and were trying to communicate a news item on their blog. That's OK as well. However, at the end, they made a snide comment on the copyright language that I put at the end of each post. They complained that they weren't able to "repost" the whole article. GEEZ!

Karen: there are many plagiarizers here. They get kersplatted but not taken down or banned - sad!

That's a very funny story on your hate mail! I'll watch for your post.

"However, at the end, they made a snide comment on the copyright language that I put at the end of each post. They complained that they weren't able to "repost" the whole article. GEEZ! ""

At least they are thinking about it. It must be a person, not a bot, Of course with or without a line reminding others the info is copyrighted, they have no right to use it in any other way than "fair use."

No doubt that the blogger would have pasted the entire article if I had not had that copyright language at the end of the post. Here's what the person wrote:

"Apparently if I recopy the article, they'll sue me within an inch of my life (lame)."

It was an article I wrote on the Verizon alert that HER sent us. Another article on this person's blog indicates that they may be a competitor of Verizon in the fibre optics business. The blogger is totally anonymous in their blog. Even their blog doesn't have a name.

This blog does not allow anonymous comments