Someone Copied Your Content Online

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If you discover someone has stolen your content, you should act quickly to have it removed. Since copyright laws vary from place to place, it is always best to seek professional legal advice from a qualified lawyer before proceeding. Here are some steps to consider

Responding to Plagiarism Checklist

Look for contact details on the offending site and send a polite message asking for the material to be removed. If there are no contact details available, try emailing webmaster@ the domain.
Use a Whois service to find out the website owner’s name and telephone number and contact them directly. Enter the domain name in the search box and the contact information should appear towards the bottom of the page.
Contact the web hosting company used by the site and inform them of their customer’s abuse. This information is also available through a Whois search.
Send a formal Cease and Desist letter notifying the offending party that they must remove the stolen content from their site. Some sample letters are available on the web.
File a notice of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement with search engines such as Google and others to have the offending site removed from their search results.
If you need proof of infringement, you can use the Internet Archive to show that the content appeared on your site at an earlier date than it appeared on the offending site.

For some additional resources, click here.

Copyscape For Plagiarism Checking

I used http://www.copyscape.com/ premium service to check all the pages on each site I create to ensure non of the content is copyrighted. Generally, SOMETHING on the net will closely match what you have written, even if it was original content straight from the top of your head to the keyboard. Below 8 ‘similar’ instances is a good place to be on the content. Always double-check the company that is writing your content and always double-check your own content writing for duplicates.

Sometimes, the duplicate content is because someone else is using what you wrote. If they are, you can use the above checklist from Copyscape to help get control over plagiarism.

Thomas J. Kane

At 16 years old in 1997 I built my first client website for a car dealership. At 17 I was one of the first few people in Kansas to be Cisco Networking Certified and I helped co-build the first computer network for a high school, two elementary schools, a hospital, and a 911 station. By the age of 40 now I have over 25,000 hours in content writing mastery and Google Advertising/SEO and have worked with over 480 different industries, amazing mentors, SEO & PPC corporate team leader at Godaddy.com, trained other SEO company's staff, managed over $37M dollars in advertising spend since 2007 for multiple companies and spent over $1M in A/B testing, created landing pages, sales funnels and massive PPC campaigns for the USA's #1 automotive leads provider, helped expand a global e-commerce business from 5 English sites to 122 sites in 30 countries in 7 languages, owned two #1 top-ranked SEO companies, in both Arizona & Kansas. Won all-expense-paid trip awards from Google for PPC performance, and been to the headquarters in Boston and California, and worked with 3 dedicated senior Google PPC teams at 3 major companies. I run an online advertising service for Montana, Kansas, Arizona & Florida businesses, as well as manage large campaigns for online national stores and services. Into renewable energy, solar, wind energy, crypto currency, Tesla, Nikola, natural health and healing, traveling, psychology, human behavior analysis, lie detection, forward progress, inspirational and educational writing, research, and analysis. Fascinated with AI (https://thomasj.ai/) and how it relates to the future of search and information.