This morning, my boss sent me a Google Alert for an article we wrote that appeared on another Website—without our permission.

Blowin’ some sax on a street corner in NYC: Cool. Using content without permission and modifying anchor text so links don’t go to their intended destinations? Not cool.

He asked three questions that you might have asked yourself when you’ve discovered that your content has been pirated, especially if you monitor your site or brand. Here are my responses…

Should This Bother Us?

Yes, it should, especially since:

• We spent considerable time (and thus money) on researching and writing an article that is both informative and optimized for search engines. It’s our (intellectual) property.

• The Website on which it appears not only one with a commercial interest (rather than a school, hospital, non-profit or somebody doing research), but it’s a pretty sketchy looking site (e.g., stock WordPress template, minimal original content, lots of duplicated and not very relevant articles) that seems to exist only to attract visitors to links for another site for insurance quotes. Classy.

• And perhaps most importantly, our links in the boilerplate show the original anchor text with our name and Website, but they link to this other company’s Website instead of ours. Again, very classy.

Is It Duplicate Content?

Literally, yes. But in terms of search engines, probably not.

“Duplicate content,” at least in the context of search engines, is usually more of a concern when you have duplicate text that lives within the same domain, especially if it’s a site that you are trying to SEO.

Is It a Good Thing?

It would be an “OK” thing if our links actually did what they were supposed to do: link back to us!

But then again, perhaps that site is doing us a favor by not linking to us. As mentioned, the rest of their site is pretty dodgy and is a classic example of low-ethics SEO…a modern-day link farm, if you will. Although links from other sites are usually something that will benefit your site in page rankings, it can also hurt it if that other site (like perhaps the one that copied our content) isn’t on the up and up.

By the Way…

In case you were wondering about the site, you can visit it at tonik-healthinsurance[dot]com/799478-Effective-Customizable-Rich-Media-Remains-Red-Hot-For-2009.html. However, you’ll have to copy the link and replace the [dot] (I’m not giving them an undeserved link!).

Also, I sent them an “e-mail” (through a form since they don’t publish their contact e-mail…trés classy) that expressed our disapproval, but I’m not expecting them to remove the article, fix the link or even respond. If they do, we’ll let you know!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under AVID Design, SEO, Writing for the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.