What to do when someone copies your blog posts, but...

Thanks everyone.

I've just installed the "Blog Content Protector" plugin, so we'll see if that will help.

It looks like they have just started building their blog and are going through all of my old posts and working their way through my site.

A few sites have copied the titles and excerpts from my posts, and then had something like, "to read more, click here..." which links back to my site. This I don't mind. But posting every posts in their entirety is very annoying.

I don't want to do anything too drastic, yet. I'll see if the plugin will work. Maybe I'll contact them later if they don't stop.

There are still quite a lot of offshore hosts and services that honor a DMCA. I've sent plenty of them and had material removed. If it's a blackhat site, it will be tougher, but if not, there's a good chance of getting it taken down.

This is what I did.
I thought maybe it will not be necessary to start a war. I have e-mailed them and asked them nicely to remove the copied content. They did not even answered my e-mail. So I reported them and things sorted out eventually.
Quite uncomfortable situation, isn't it? :-(

There are people who don't know that it's stealing.

Some are perhaps just a little naive, and others have been told that it's "content curation" and believe that that somehow makes it ok. :rolleyes:

Have you seen how many threads there are here, which start with someone asking "Is it ok to take articles from people's blogs if you include a backlink to them?" and contain one or two ill-informed replies saying "Yes, I don't think you'll have any problems doing that, as long as you include the link"? :p

It may be that they don't know that they're not allowed to do this, and that one simple email is all it will take to remedy the entire situation. Which is why I'm having a little difficulty understanding the OP's apparent desire not to take any action, here. But hey ... it's her content, not mine ...

This will only work for new posts, right? All the old feed posts are still in their entirety.

The downside is that I use RSS Graffiti to post on my Facebook page, and in order to get the first image of my post onto FB, I have to enable "Full" post for RSS.

Is there a better App for auto post to Facebook?

Ok, so far I have changed the RSS publishing to excerpt only, and I have installed the Blog Content Protector plugin. But the copying continues.

Every day, I get about 10-20 ping backs from their site.

The curious thing is that they even copied the "You might also like..." links, which all link back to my site, of course.

Even the Facebook and Twitter likes are identical. So if I have 10 FB likes and 5 Twitter likes on that post, it's the same on theirs. It seems they copied everything.

What kind of software are they using to do that? It can't be through the RSS feed.

It looks like they are attempting to do a massive all purpose info site. They are not just copying my site, but other people's sites as well.

Their categories are a mess. They have everything from Automobile to Entertainment to Design to General Products to News. Everything is mixed together. So an Automobile related post is categorized under Entertainment, Design & News as well.

It's a very amateurish looking site with no "About, Privacy or Contact" links. They do have a WP "Sample Page". The bottom-line is, the site looks horrible.

They just splash a lot of Google Adsense ads above the fold, and they have ad links on every image. If someone clicks an image, it will take them to the image link on my site. But at the bottom of the image, they have an ad link box, so if someone click that box instead, it's an ad click.

I am not so worried about them outranking me. They have done no basic SEO (the title bar just shows their domain URL on every post), and they have very few back links.

My site is pretty solid. Almost all of my backlinks are natural, from other authority sites linking to me naturally over the years. So that's not something people can copy.

According to Whois, they probably started making this site around fall of 2011, and their current Alexa ranking is only around 5 million. Obviously they are not getting much traffic to be making any money.

But I'm curious what kind of software they are using. They are definitely not doing this manually, some of the ping backs I get have the exact same timecode for 3 to 4 posts at once.

Here's an update:

They stopped after I e-mailed them.

BUT, now I've discovered other sites doing the same thing.

Is this what they call autoblogging? I found at 4 to 5 websites doing the same thing -- copying content from my website as well as other websites using some auto software.