Stealing Content - don't be an idiot!

H

handsonhosting

New member
Over the years we have written many detailed articles in our knowledgebase for our customers to learn from and receive speedy answers. We've spend HUNDREDS of hours writing content and have thousands of articles. It helps us help our customers faster. No problem there.

What bothers me is people stealing our content. If the article is of use to you, by all means, take a clue from our articles and re-write a similar article for your web hosting business. If you copy content DIRECT word for word, you hurt yourself for SEO rankings (something we all strive for).

Now, lets say you do decided to lift all our content - don't be such an idiot that you don't remove our COMPANY NAME from the articles!!! When an article has "Here at Hands-on Web Hosting, you can click the cPanel link" - doesn't it just make sense to REMOVE that line? Some people have decided to lift our articles directly and choose not to remove our name.

I've contacted the hosting companies in question and they haven't even responded to the emails I've sent. So I've contacted Google to sandbox the sites ;) DMCA at it's best!

Feel free NOT to host with hosting companies that are too lazy to write their own articles and STEAL content from other sites;

http://www.diginetmagic.com/support-center/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=11

https://www.hourhost.com/whmcs/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=53

A little common sense when STEALING content from somewhere else and removing our company name should at least be a small effort these "hosting companies" should make!
 
This is why all my support documentation is locked behind password protection: there are just some stupid people out there. My support documentation is one of the big things that differentiates me from other hosts - the depth, breadth, writing style, information flow, et cetera. While I have no problem with those who might draw inspiration from this style, or skim the titles and then go write their own content for said titles, or look for other subjects which they haven't covered and then go write their own content...I don't trust that even college students won't lift my content and use it wholesale.

(And I personally don't look for high SEO rankings - on the main site yes, but not off of the support stuff. I rely on word of mouth to build my client base, and while I don't have a huge business and never will, this suits me and my clients quite well.)

I've had hosts copy the TOS wholesale, and sometimes they leave the name in there. Other times, they don't remove all the links...which of course routes their potential customers over to my site.
 
Yeah, we have a number of articles that are locked for members, but we have about 600 or so that are public. We don't strive for SEO stuff on there, but you'd be surprised just how much traffic comes in from the KB articles. I know I was!!

Hopefully these guys will get their acts together and run a hosting company as they SHOULD - and not steal other people's hard work. Contracts included!
 
That is a shame. These kids these days just can't create something original, they have to copy and paste. On top of that they don't read it and leave other company names in it.
 
I got a note back from "hourhost" saying that they were a new company starting out and that their staff pulled information from various places. The person that responded did say that it was unacceptable and woudl be talking to other members about the incident to insure it doesn't happen again.

Now *IF* any of that ever happens I'll be surprised, but they at least did acknowledge that they were in the wrong. They also peaded to have us contact Google to remove them from the DMCA complaint - maybe that's what lit the fire under them ;)
 
Talking about this some kids even go and RIP the template you have by going into your image folder like sitename.com/images or image you have to be carfull of this i say you should put a blank index.html file in your images folder so its harder for them to take the image like they have to go into the coding and stuff.


Also yes, some kids do go out to other sites and copy and past No one likes it
If only there was a way to stop it..
 
While there are limited ways to stop it (you can always screen capture and slice afterwards) - the DMCA Violation rules are pretty strict. It's VERY easy to prove your case, and just as easy for Google and other places to remove listings in search engines. Also, sending the DMCA to the hosting company (or the data center) will shut down almost any site if found guilty.

One of these days it will all catch up to them ;)
 
This thread reminds me one incident. A couple of months ago, a kid stole one of my articles and posted it on his free wordpress blog. Then when I was searching for the SERPs ( I check too much, Sigh!!) for that particular topic I stumbled on his blog. Evidently all the articles on his blogs are copied from other sites and blogs. I warned his and gave him one day time for a linkback or removal of the article and even left a comment for that article on his blog.

The next day I checked my mails to see if he replied to me or not. He didn't. I went to his blog URL only to find it was archieved (blog deleted). The very next day he sent me a mail asking if I complained about it to Wordpress and I said I didn't and explained all the stuff about his copied content and said someone would have complained them and get it shut down.

What amazed me was he brought his blog to withinn 2 hundred K rank of Alexa with all copied content. And was giving a lot of links to other sites (must be a do-follow link seller on webmaster forums). With that incident he lost his blog, And I was back to my normal routine.

But, Those 5 minutes, That I spent reading the blog post on his blog only to find out he "100%" copied my article was unbearable. That feeling, I can never forget.

You should get anybody's blog or site shut down if they copied your content with out a linkback.
 
Its too bad not everyone reports these thieves. If more people would file an actual complaint, we may be able to get the sites removed all together. Having articles stolen is irritating!! Even worse when they actually try to steal an entire sites worth of work...disgusting. Luckily most (but not all) search engines and hosting providers act fairly quickly to resolve the problem.
 
Back in my design days I have taken a number of developers and program to legal action for inteletual property theft. These days, the court process takes so long that sites lose ranking VERY quickly. I use a number of services to protect the text and articles that I write. Copyscape is probably the most popular, and Google Alert is another tool that is often underused by people.

Designs I no longer worry too much about as I am no longer in that field, but I had a slew of designers that I worked with and associated with on various forums that were always on the lookout for content theft (and design theft).

Remember, MUCH of what is done these days can be protected under the Berene Convention (1996 I think), and DMCA Violations. Datacenters, Hosting Companies (most) and even some site owners, are very quick to remove content but it doesn't necessarily get rid of archives etc. For that, reporting to search engines can usually sandbox archive areas too.
 
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