Need Help From My Friends Here

[Scooter]

Help or Suggestions Needed!

The short of the long: By trade I am a roofer... My employer had deplorable standing in the SERPS, so I created several (17) blogs on various topics with backlinks to the company website. Now during that endeavor I realized that I did well in the SERPS for "Waukesha Roofing Contractor", and thus I did my best to take advantage of it to the benefit of my very new business (denoted below) which I can make some pretty good side work income with. Anyhow, weeks, and perhaps a month or so have passed sinse I did a Google search for the "term", and a day or so ago I observed some Page Returns -- which actually quoted text form my blogs, as well as articles I've published utilizing the "Waukesha Roofing Contractor" meta/keyword description. However, the URL associateed with these terms, keywords, etc., have an association that is not mine! It is a foreign URL that some how has tapped into my published sources to get their site up in the SERPS.
Any idea how this could happen and what my recourse in this situation may be?

~Scooter

[dreamscaper]

I would guess that someone could have simply ripped off your articles or posts and used them on their websites and got them ranked well with backlinks; I remember months ago that Vic had a contest to see who could be the most successful with their website and to prove a point about Google's weak copied content monitoring, he took the posts from some of the other competitors and posted them together to make some super long posts and then gave them some good back link love and watched as they outranked the originals. Then he withdrew from the contest just to avoid any conflicts with other entrants. (does anybody remember this and could locate whereI would have read about this?)

As for what you could do, just go to Google and maybe give them the details of what has been stolen from you content-wise. (just remember to play up the 'victim' angle and that your hard work has been plagiarized, avoid the 'backlinks for my employer' part of it of course) Maybe even use copyscape to back up your claims?

Hope that is of some help, but others here will know much more than me about this kind of stuff probably.

[jacksparrow]

Actually I am having the exact same situation. What you can do depends on what platforms/hosts those scrappers are on.

If they are using free sites like Blogger, Wordpress, etc, then you will need to contact these hosts and inform them of the plagiarization. Some of them will act only on DMCA complaints, so you need to provide a document showing the stuff that has been copied and then send it to them. Blogger has an online DMCA form that you can fill up (http://help.blogger.com/bin/request.py? ... nfringment). Wordpress you can contact the support directly via the Contact form. Response times for these really depends. Some don't bother, the more reputable ones do but they also take time. I've had the fastest response from Wordpress.com.

If they are self hosted, then you will need to do some whois checks. Find out what hosts and server providers they are on. If they are situated in the US, then you can contact the providers directly and send them a DMCA complaint. They will usually act on it. If they are not in the US, then sorry no luck as the DMCA is not applicable to them (or they basically don't care).

Before you take on these extreme measures though, you may wish to try to contact the site owners themselves. If they have contact email addresses, great. Send them a cease and desist. If they do not respond in kind, and if you're still keen to get them, then the above measures will come into play.

Most of the time though it's hard to stop them and very time consuming unless you have a team behind you to get all this done. Better to try to get more links in the long run.
Hope this helps in some way.

[Scooter]

Thanks for the suggestions.
I have actually had some email contact with the perpetrator and this individual has provided numerous excuses; which I'm not buying! He said that the problem is Big G -- that somehow they are doing it through RSS...
It just doesn't add up though! The craziest part is that the content which shows up in the SERPS with their URL does not appear anywhere within their URL page(s)? Anyhow, this individual purported that as a gesture of peace he will be altering their RSS feeds.
I did locate and record all necessary info, including taking screeen shots, in the evnt that I am forced to make a formal complaint with their host provider.

Again, thanks for the suggestions.