Forum

[tdigitty]

So, I have a couple articles posted on ezinearticles.com...I created Google alerts for them to see if anyone liked them enough to republish them. Well, there are a few people that like my articles, however they stripped my links and added their own. Some of the people at least made a VERY POOR (so much so that I'm not worried about it) attempt at spinning the article.

However, there are a couple people that straight up copied the article 100% from EA, removed all my links and included their own.

I'm pissed off to say the least. They are original - 100% unique.

What do you guys do about this, if anything?

 

[cterao]

This happened to me a few months ago. For the most part, this isn't really a big deal as long as your original articles on your site are already indexed.

In my case, they weren't. So I sent an e-mail to the guy that owned the offending trashy celebrity gossip blog. He took them down quickly.

If he doesn't take them down, you can always go on to hit him where it hurts:

Contact his hosting company and tell them that they are hosting plagiarized work

Contact the hosting company's bandwidth provider and tell them that they are providing bandwidth for a hosting company that is hosting plagiarized work.

Contact the advertisers on his website (Google Adsense, Clickbank, individual merchants, etc), and tell them that he is using plagiarized content to promote their products or services.

Contact Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. and tell them that the website has plagiarized content and get them to deindex the site.

Find any friends' blogs or client lists on the site and e-mail these people that their friend or consultant is violating copyright laws and politely suggest that they terminate any business relationship with him in order to preserve the integrity of their own brand.

But, for the most part, this usually isn't a battle that's worth fighting. If you're petty (like me), it can be fun to exact swift and brutal revenge, though.

Have fun :)

 

[faradina]

We have another member who has the same problem; she sent in a support ticket to us. Now that I see that somebody else (you) are affected I am beginning to suspect that the ones that have been poorly spun may be the work of an automatic article writing or spinning program that grabs bits and/or chunks from the net, "spins"/"rewrites" them, and then publishes them.
The ones that are copied 100% with the links replaced would of course be something that a real live person would do.
I advised the other member to get in touch with the site owner and at the same time communicate with ezinearticles as to what can be done about it. She could not see how to contact the site owner and somebody else recommended that she get in touch with blogspot (the site that copied her article is on blogspot) and I agreed that it would be a good idea.

 

[tdigitty]

@cterao - You don't pull any punches...brutal...I like it. Thanks for the suggestions.

@faradina - I think you're correct regarding the auto spinning...I mean it's really bad...punctuation is off, random characters through out. If it was spun by a human, it was done by a 3 year old.

So I contacted 2 of the site owners (I'm not even going to bother with the spun article). One of them removed my article with in minutes. The other did not take any action whatsoever. So, I complained to the domain registrar, and ezine articles (it looks like they are doing the same thing with other peoples ezine articles as well). I was about to complain to their host but they want it in writing and mailed to them...haven't got around to that yet.

It would be one thing if they made a decent effort to spin the article or rewrite it but a 100% original copy?!

Anyway, we'll see what happens...

Thanks for your comments.

 

[jmpruitt]

@cterao Thanks man I needed that. spewed coffee on my screen but it was well worth the laugh.
there are a lot of content scrapers that steal articles from websites and republishes it. I had one of my articles from my own site and it was 100% original and unique. when I spin, i delete the original, so that the only place the original wording shows up is on my own site. yet I still occasionally find them posted elsewhere, with no credit to where it was scraped from.

I even saw a forum post the other day in another forum. the poster swore it was orriginal content, but I linked to my site which is where i had it posted.

Dont scrape content and post it in a forum as the original author, if the original author is there, and sees it, they wont take too kindly to your theft.

 

[pzenji]

Lol...am amazed by what I am reading here.
Just written hundreds of articles and to be honest I dont bother checking up on any of them.
I guess its worthwhile getting these lazy thieves!

 

[tdigitty]

@pzenji: I'm really not sure if it's worthwhile in the long run. I only have a few articles out there, so it doesn't take much time. However 100+, it may be counter productive. Probably something to pass off to a VA or not even worry about.

It really does piss me off though!!!

 

[jmpruitt]

i have seen a some of my articles ripped off, and i dont like it, but it happens. If i find it, i will do something about it, but usually, i dont go around checking every single one. You get to the point where it you have so many out that it is counter productive. I probably have over 500 articles just with what is on all my sites.

That does not include all the articles I have on my social sites, article directories, guest posts on blogs, and every where else I have posted content.

 

[ktab2010]

I've the some problem with my articles. I saw my articles which were posted to enzinearticles listed on some weird sites and the whole article has been changed with no meaning in words! It shows the source is enzinearticles, my author name and a link to my site. This does not look good for my reputation since the words are totally scrambled with no meaning. First I contacted enzinearticles and they could not help me. They told me to contact the admin or registry sites.

I tried to find out the administrator for these sites. There was no contact info on their sites so I had to run WHOIS in different registry sites to find some email addresses. Contacted them a few times for the last few weeks (it’s been a month now). They did not answer my emails and requests. Tried to contact registry sites and they could not do anything either!!

How do I find out who is the hosting company?

Wow, this is so much hassle going after them!

 

[Aletta]

If you're digging the "principle of the matter" then by all means, go chasing.

But if it's taking you hours to chase, you're probably better off just ignoring it. Or if they've kicked your site into the supplementary results because their version of your article got indexed first, just reword your article to be unique.

You shouldn't have to, but it'll be faster than trying to get other people to fix it.

I think this is actually a form of procrastination... at the end of the day, it's probably not making a very big difference to your business, and fixing it isn't going to earn you any more money.

So either admit that it's a personal grudge (hey, that's fine!) or fix it quickly and move on. You're not going to be discouraging anyone by going through channels to get them.

 

[wosull]

Same thing happend to me the other day... Wrote an article and posted it to a couple of directories. Was in like 2nd pos in google for my keyword with my ezinearticle and the next day a guys blog jumped to second spot with my identical article stripped of my resource box... now that sux.

Having someone else rank better than you by using your own stuff... :)

Anyway contacted him by doing a whois on the domain and asked him politely to rectify the matter. He did within a day and said it was really just an error on his behalf.

But like Aletta mentions it just so time consuming trying to run around and check on every article being re-published and so unproductive that unless its right in my face on like page 1 I couldnt be bothered...

Still that being said it kinda feels we do the dirty work (writing the articles) for someone else to benefit so easily. Oh well thats how the cookie crumbles I suppose...

 

[jake5691]

Virtually every article on ezines gets ripped of, i even had a few which i found on a press release site. To be honest chasing people down takes a lot of time away from doing what you should be doing.

To be honest there is no real way to stop it unless you are prepared to use a lot of your valuable time.

As soon as i have an ezine article published, i bookmark it and submit the rss feed, this helps to get your article up there before people can rip it off. I then rewrite the article using a decent spinner, and post it to a number of web 2.0 properties.

I leave a link to my original ezine article, and 1 link to my site form the articles on web 2.0 sites.

This is beneficial for your site and your ezine article.

 

[tdigitty]

Update...One of the websites that ripped off my article was actually ranking 2 spots under me on Google with 100% duplicate content. Just checked again and my article got dumped below 100 and the thief stuck. So now this person is out ranking me, using my own content!!!

Unreal...I think it's worth taking the guy down using cterao's pay back arsenal in this case..