Is There Anything You Can Do When Someone Steals Your Content?

Yes.

You need to explain to EZA that you're the original author (send them a link) and that the content was stolen from your own site by someone else (give them a link to that, too, in the same email). It's tiresome the way EZA suspends people's accounts until they explain this, but they do understand that it can happen to entirely innocent people, and your chances of resolving it with them are very, very high. If you can check the dates, they can check the dates.

Not unless the thief has a site with much better than SEO than yours (unlikely, because they're often autoblog people who have no idea what they're doing at all). But in any case, that's going to be temporary when you serve a DMCA take-down notice on them. You do need to do that, regardless of the situation with Ezine Articles. In fact, probably better to do that first and mention to EZA that you've already done so. There are details and a specimen DMCA notice on Suzanne's site, here: DMCA | Domaining Diva

Sorry to hear that this happened to you, Laura. There are plenty of thieves and idiots about, unfortunately.

I was going to reply but noticed Alexa already gave you sound advice. :-)

I hate to see that it happened to you, it happens to the best of us.

Your not alone.

Matt

The only sure way to make sure that no one steals your
work is not to publish it.

Otherwise Alexa has given you some remedial actions
you can take. The same happened to me except
my articles were bring sold in a PLR package.

-Ray Edwards

DMCA Takedown!

It works. It's a pain, but it works.

I can't stand people who steal content. If you don't want to write your own content then outsource it. Sorry to hear it happened to you.

You should get one of those "page protectors" so that people can't copy the words on your site. They can't scroll over the words, nor do a ctrl+c (copy) command.

This is really sad but it happens a lot of times. I agree if you can't come up with your own content then have someone else make content for you. The thing is stealing someone's work on the net is really common and at this point I don't think there's nothing much you or anyone can do about it. Hopefully, in the future it would be easier to track those people who copy someone's work.

Sorry to hear that, trentonlaura. Really hates that when it happens to me before. These people should have outsource their writing instead of blatant copying.

Yes, I agree, if you use page protector then it would really be nice idea!

We have run into this problem so many times that I built a tool specifically for making DMCA Notices quick and easy. A lot of others have had this problem so we put the tool up on our site for anyone to use free. I don't have enough thread posts to put the actual link in here, but if you go to wpformarketers.com and click on the Free Resources link you will see it.

Alexa's suggestion is good, really good. Don't be surprised if others will recommend you to just focus on writing new content instead of spending your time tracing the thief. I read a similar discussion on other threads not so long ago and that's what some people recommended to the OP.

#justsaying

Google takes such issues seriously. If you saw your content on a Blogspot blog, report it to Google using the following link and giving all the details:

Report alleged copyright infringement: Blogger - Google Help

Don't bother trying to contact the blog owner because they didn't contact you while copying your content.

Just a couple of days ago, I found a Blogspot blog that had one of my old articles on it and it had broken image links pointing to my site which is not active now. I reported it to Google telling them that my site was inactive at the moment but the broken image links were proof that it was my original content and in about two days I got an email from Google telling me that the article was removed. When I checked that blog again, the article was really removed.

If it is not a Blogspot site, find their host via who.is or a similar site and report them to their host. If they are a good company, they will remove it.

I do spend most of my time creating original content. I wouldn't have minded it if it didn't cause trouble with Ezine which annoyed me and cost me some of my time, so I figured why not get some opinions here.

I may just go ahead and contact Google via the link, thanks!

Awesome timing on this topic!

Last Friday, I spotted a WF member (sad, I know but I'll refrain from calling him out here) copying articles from my website and lightly re-writing them (i.e. changing the introduction and synonums, but none of the actual content or even the images or order of the content) and that of another collegue I know well.

I contacted him and he's taken them down for now, but I doubt it will continue. His response was :

Going forward, what I won't do is avoid any given topics that exist on any other website, performing keyword research for ranking terms (as I am sure you do and title your posts accordingly that is just good SEO). Nothing is directly plagiarized as you have claimed as Google penalizes sites with very similar content that follow any original publishing of it. In this case you would have nothing to worry about as I would be killing my own site if I copied others work and passed it as my own. Google's algorithm would delist it. Every 'new and original' idea comes from that of others before with your own added take and perspective. The very fact we both write about running is copying from what we have learned from those before us with our own take from our own experiences.

Pissed me off to no end.

yeah - go squeeze their head.

sorry to hear !!