I was very annoyed actually! At one point, when searching for a specific term one of these “copycat bloggers,” ranked higher than US! It is extremely unethical, cheap, and just plain dirty. And like Khalid said, some of these guys actually post the article word for word and have a cheap little sentence at the intro stating: “I’ve run across some interesting tips by INVESP.” And although they do link back to us, the way that they stole the content from under our noses is very bothersome. Actually, the other day I ran across a site that posted a FutureNow Whitepaper on their site as well. So it’s a common problem, and I wish there was a way around it…but I have no suggestions!

You have the reason to get upset and even mad.
I blog most of the time and I own two blogs. I admit that sometimes, when I like one’s post I tend to copy the post from other blogger, but unlike others, I do give credits and give a link back to the blog where I copied a post.

Who ever did that to you Khalid, they must be ashame! It is really annoying and disrespectful.

The bottom line is, it is still good to write a post on your own.

In other venues that I write for, authors either demand payment or demand that the content be taken down.

It is really disturbing that this goes on, regarless of whether it is a blog or an article. Some people are just so incredibly lazy and sleazy!

Bevelyn I sometimes copy excerpts from specific blogs and give due credit to the writer. But when you plan on copying the blog in it’s entirety, blog etiquette requires you to notify the blogger that you are planning on copying from. Additionally, when credit is not given to the blogger/writer, that is considered complete copyright infringement.

Hi Ayat
I am aware of notifying the blog owner too.. But uhm, I dont copy the whole content, I just copy some excerpts and give them credits and link back to their blogs. And most of them are my friends, so it’s easy for me to drop them a message and ask permissions. But oh, to bloggers that I don’t know? I don’t copy.. ^_^

That’s great Bevelyn! It’s important to link to others through your blog because it helps to establish better connections amongst bloggers, and honestly, it makes the blog way more interesting!

Very well said Ayat!

Sorry to hear about this Khalid. I suppose to some degree it’s inevitable, but still this sounds like content theft pure and simple.

It’s natural for bloggers to borrow a little from each other. I know I’ll grab an idea here or there and I’ll even use text from another blog. When I do though, I always make sure to place it in a blockquote and I’ll make sure to link back to the post where the text came from out of respect to the original author.

It’s sad that some people want to take content without giving proper credit.

How did you find that?

It is sad people do it, but it is best not to worry about it too much and just hope you can get links out of it

Report it to his hosting company.

Well. If they link back, I’d be somewhat ok with it. If they just start to use your content more and more without credit, I’d email them, ask them what’s up, and clear the misunderstanding. If they don’t reply or aren’t cooperative, threaten legal action. That’ll shake them up.

@Mahesh: I was doing a search on Google for “conversion optimization” when I discovered this by mere luck. I believe there are services out there that will provide more structured approach to making sure web content is not getting copied.

@Jim, I tried to report something like this in the past. Most hosting companies are too slow to react and require a large amount of paperwork to be filled out before they take an action.

@Shantanu, even if they link back, I still have an issue with copying content. At minimal, this will cause duplicate content issues with Google which is something no one wants to deal with.

That really stinks. Take heart that your content is so good that it is worth copying. But really copying is low. I would pursue it further. That is your hard work out there.

I would just ignore them. People like that will be too idle to copy for too long anyway.

Some idiot pinged me, accusing me of stealing a post from him the other day. And when I tried to visit his site, he’d blocked me from it.

The hilarious thing is, it was a post about interview tips, and every single one was taken straight from my own experiences in interviewing people. Surely he can’t have interviewed the same people too?!

How did you find the site? I would contact them and let them know you’ve seen the copied content and ask them to remove it.

If they are outranking you in Google SERPs, email them, get their site taken down, or whatever.

If they’re not, could be a bit of a waste of time. They’ll probably fade away eventually.

If you want to see who’s copying you, just pick a fairly unique sentence from your page, and stick it, _in quotation marks_, in Google.