Dealing with Plagiarism

You already know that someone has copied your site and stole your content. Perhaps this is the first time you are thinking about plagiarism. We are not here to preach about prevention, especially when no preventive measures can offer 100% protection against content theft.

At Dixon Price, we are experienced at handling plagiarism cases and can usually resolve them quickly.

So let’s see what you can do now to catch the thief and get back to your old position in the search engine rankings. You would:

• Take screenshots of your website and the duplicate website, just in case.
• Contact the owner of the duplicate website. Your blood may be boiling at the thought, but content theft can be accidental. Imagine that your competitor hired a web developer to build them a website. Now let’s say that the developer is a dishonest person who can’t be bothered to put in the work, so they go and copy your website instead. The owner of the website would have no idea this has happened. So your first step would be to speak ot them, explain the situation and ask them to remove your content from their site.
• If this doesn’t fix the situation, you would contact the company that is hosting your thief’s site and ask them to take the site down. A lot of the hosting companies will want to see proof of ownership, and might specifically request to see your copyright.
• Your next step would be to serve a DMCA cease and desist notice to the website’s owner and their hosting company.
• Then you file a DMCA takedown notice with the search engines, in order to have the duplicate website removed from search results. You can also contact directories where the duplicate website is listed, explain the situation and some of them will remove the links.
• If the issue is still not resolved, you can begin legal action as a last resort.

The resolution

There are a two possible outcomes. You would either:

• Have the offending website removed from search engines, but it would continue to exist. Annoying as it is, it would no longer threaten the ranking of your website and the duplicate website would remain unsearchable (in many cases, this would render the copied website useless to the thief).

  Or

• Have the offending website taken down completely. This is possible to do easily in some cases, but in others it can turn out to be too costly/time-consuming to make it worth the effort.

Why not turn to us for help?

We would investigate the situation and take all the necessary steps to remove the website. If this proves difficult, we would discuss the matter with you and explain all the options and the associated costs, so you can decide what is best for your business. We believe in working within the budget and would never take costly action without your approval.