writefortheweb

Writing for the web today can create many potential concerns. Search engines are often a website’s biggest ally or obstacle. As a writer it is your job to make the search engines their allies. This means your content needs to be fresh, original and interesting. Unfortunately there are many writers and webmasters that like to take short cuts, so your created content may be duplicated elsewhere.

If this is a problem with an article written for a client, then you are facing some major concerns, as they may perceive the duplication as something you sold again to some one else with out the benefit of PLR notation. Obviously they will not be using your services again. Also, if this is your website or blog that is being copied you will lost search engine rankings, which will diminish your personal standing online. How do you address this? By taking action, not sitting still allowing your hard work to be flushed down the search engine rankings because of another site’s duplication problems.

There are 3 possibly 4 steps:

The first is that you take a moment and identify the website that has your duplicate content. Start by coping a key sentence - the entire sentence - into your search engine of choice. If it brings up a site with similar content that is not duplicated, then you are fine, however if there is another page identical to the one you have on your site or your client’s you will see it too. From there visit the Whois domain identification site and look up the owner. Write a polite and professional business email that indicates a need to remove the duplicated article or content. Often this is all you need to do.

If you wrote the email and did not receive the results you are looking for you need to then follow up by contacting the hosting company they are registered with. When you do this, you must have the dates you published the content to the web, and the dates they did. It must be provable, and you need to be ready to do so. Once the hosting company sees the site is duplicating content, they will address it by removing the duplicated content or the plagarism site all together.

The last obvious step would then be to contact Google, Yahoo, and MSN the 3 major search engines and file a  Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement against the site. This will enable the search engines to punish the site creating duplicate content.

The final step is only a last resort and that would be to take legal action against the site owners and the webmaster involved in the infringement.

The big key her is ACTION - Take it when you find your work is duplicated.