Prevent Your Unique Content From Scraping

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You can't protect your content technically, once it's available on the Internet. However, besides enforcing the law to its full extent you've other chances, which can become even amusing.

Yesterday CopyScape alerted me to a content thief reprinting my stuff at XXX¹. This moron scraped a few paragraphs from my tutorial on Google Sitemaps, replaced a link to Google's SEO page by a commercial call for action, and uploaded the plagiarism as sales pitch for his dubious and pretty useless SEO tools.

As usual, I've documented the case and sent it over to my lawyer. Then I thought I could do more with all the screen shots, WHOIS info etc., and developed a template for a page of evidence¹. Now it takes me only a few minutes to publish everything others should know about a content thief. Entering a few variables and pushing a button creates a nice page documenting the copyright infringement.

Unfortunately I can't post the template, because it works with my CMS only, but you'll get the idea. Be creative yourself, put the thief's name, company and personal data promitently nearby terms like 'evil' and 'thief' all over the page, including the META tags. Then link to the page and submit it to all search engines. After a while do a search for the thief and check out whether you've outranked the offending site. If not, consider reading a few of my articles on search engine optimizing ;)

Friday, July 22, 2005

Spam Detection is Unethical

The value of links from a search engine's perspective

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My content was removed after my outing page was picked up by the engines and ranked fine within a few days. Thus I've removed links and names from this post.
Here is another example of an outing page: Content Theft: Tahir J. Farooque's plagiarism at CRESOFT.COM. This page outranked the business name and more on all engines, before I got an apology from a guy stating the company was sold to him after the copyright infringement, thus I've removed it from all search engine indexes.

Author: Sebastian
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