After yesterday’s post, I went to Reddit and asked for some help. Between Reddit and Facebook, I received some interesting responses.
The Redditors pointed me to whois.net, which is the website to use for something like this. You type in the URL of any website, and it gives you the registrant information (assuming the information isn’t private). The nefarious website in question is from India, and it looks like they simply have bots that crawl through the net and copy random parenting blogs. I won’t give out their address. Since they are already copying people’s material, I don’t want to give them any more attention or web hits. I already sent them an angry missive demanding they take my post down. Bill from Facebook had it right:
“Are you sure it wasn’t just a junk blog? Spammers create programs that auto-copy hundreds of blog entries at once as a way to generate ad revenue. Strange but true.”
Apparently, this happens quite frequently. Gena Miller wrote about a similar incident on her blog, Girl Gone Domestic:
“… I recently had my blog content stolen and copied on a website and it looks as if yours is there too. I was able to get an email address from WhoIs. I sent an email asking them to remove my content and I thought you may want to do the same. I was especially concerned because they took content regarding my two year old. Sadly this looks to be like a blog from India and contacting them probably won’t do much good.”
One the Redditors had some good advice:
“People do this to me fairly frequently, too. It’s annoying, but that is all it is. This website is duplicating your content. Google knows it is your content and this website won’t get any of your search traffic because Google will rank you above them. They also contain a link to your website which they’ve copied in the story — this is a good thing to show search engines that the content belongs to you not them. They may even pass along some useful ‘link juice’ to you (but probably not really).”
Not all of the responses were positive, however. Someone on Reddit wrote:
“Wow people are stealing mediocre blog posts, piracy is really getting out of hand.”
To that I say:
If this happens consistently, there are further options—such as filing a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and request removal of the offending site from Google’s index. But for now, I’m just assuming that this is a random and sporadic phenomenon. In that vein, I’m calling off the dogs, calling off Liam Neeson, and just chilling out for now. Lesson learned.
jeffsilvey.com 
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