Evidently, they are working out some issues with Google related to their service, and hopefully they’ll be back in business soon. It’s a great resource.

The search engines can tell who published information first, but it all depends on how quick the scrappers are – if their version happens to get indexed before yours, they’ll get the credit. And, if their site is stronger in the search engines than yours, their version will show up first on the results page, even if yours was indexed first.

And, besides that, it’s just not professional as far as I’m concerned. We all work hard to create useful posts and website information, and someone else stealing it just makes my blood boil!

So, keep sending those cease & desists. The least we can do is make it uncomfortable for the thieves.

Kathleen

Our blog frequently gets hit by copy scrapers. Blogspot is the worst domain for spammers I’ve ever seen. You always are told that someone stealing your content won’t affect you in the search engines, but I doubt that’s true…There seems to be good evidence Google has a dupe content penalty, and who only knows how they decide who posted first?

I can imagine that if web thieves think their hosting is at risk, it would certainly get their attention!

Thanks for the tip.

Kathleen

I find blogs to be the biggest offenders. Some bloggers think they can take a person’s article, remove the byline and author’s note, and publish it as their own work.

I follow similar steps to what you’ve recommended, but I add something like:

“Please correct this issue as soon as possible. The only other course of action I will have is to file a complaint with your web host, GoDaddy [or whoever].”

I find this gets people’s attention faster than anything else.

Take care!

-Brandon