If you have ever had someone steal your content and claim it as their own, you have likely felt frustrated and angry that someone else is reaping the benefits of your hard work. You may also have felt powerless to do anything about it, however there are steps you can take to take back your content (more on this in a minute).
Some time ago I had someone steal hundreds of my graphics and overlay their logo over them (replacing mine with theirs), and then use them on Facebook and Twitter.
I was alerted by someone else and since their website had a phone number, I picked up the phone, identified myself and shared the problem.
The gal who answered the phone said, “’I’ll find out who’s responsible”. It took several days, but the business did delete the majority of them.
Unfortunately, my experience isn’t unique; content theft happens every single day. But how do you know what’s considered content theft and what’s not?
What is Content Theft?
Any situation in which someone uses your content – whether it is your images or your written content – without a link back to your site, that is content theft. In fact, even using one of your images with attribution may be considered copyright infringement depending on whether or not you have deemed it creative commons. This is something that I recently learned myself!
Here are a few examples of situations that would be considered copyright infringement:
- Someone modifies and uses your images (which you have NOT deemed creative commons)
- Someone uses your images with OR without attribution (if you own the image and it’s not creative commons, no one can actually use it, even WITH a link back to your site!)
- Someone re-publishes entire pages of your content on their site verbatim (this is referred to as content scraping)
- Someone quotes or reposts excerpts of your content without giving attribution
Steps You Can Take When Your Content Has Been Stolen
Whether you want to take action against a content thief is entirely up to you. At times you may actually receive some SEO benefits from having your content stolen (if there is a link back to your site).
In some cases, however, you may decide the infringement is significant enough to pursue action to have the content removed. In this case, there are 4 steps you can follow to take back your content.
1. Take a Picture.
Before you do anything else, I would recommend taking a screenshot of the offending content as proof, particularly if the extent of the theft is significant. This will protect you from any ‘he said she said’ should things escalate.
2. Contact the Owner of the Site.
In the majority of cases of copyright infringement, the perpetrator will not have done so intentionally. Oftentimes a polite email or phone call asking them remove the content (or at least give attribution in the form of a link to your site) will be sufficient.
In many cases, you will be able to find contact information on the site’s contact page, but if not, you can run a search on WhoIs.net.
This communication is typically known as a ‘cease and desist’ letter, and depending on the nature of the theft, you may or may not want to use this terminology. For instance, if an otherwise reputable blogger has unknowingly used one of your images, a simple, friendly email is usually enough. For a site that is clearly scraping your content however, you may want to use the ‘big guns’, and warn of ‘further action’ should the content not be removed expeditiously.
3. Contact the Web Host.
If the website owner refuses to take down the content or doesn’t respond to your communications within a reasonable amount of time, the next step would be to contact the site’s hosting company. You can use WhoIsHostingThis.com to get this info.
Provide the screenshots you took above, or other proof of ownership (for instance the time stamp on your post), and request that the content be removed. In some cases this may result in the content being removed, while in others it may result in the entire site being shut down.
4. Contact Google.
If you have no luck with any of the above, a final course of action should be to contact Google directly to let them know about the infringement. This will ensure that Google understands that you are the original author or creator of the content, meaning you receive the rankings, NOT the thief.
You may also want to file a Google Spam report in Google Webmaster Tools, just to cover all your bases.
Unfortunately, most website owners will experience content theft at some point. In most cases, you will find that a simple email will take care of the problem.
However if that doesn’t work and you feel your site or search engine rankings are being negatively impacted by the theft, you will likely want to take action as soon as possible using the steps above. I hope that my post has given you some guidance on what to do if and when someone steals your content.
Have you ever been the victim of content theft? How did you deal with it?
This has happened to me. My entire site was copied. Even the domain it was copied to was my domain with a single letter added to the end of it. It was clearly malicious.
Dealing with it and having it taken down was not as simple as sending their hosting company a few screen shots.
You have to file a DMCA Takedown request. And even then, depending on who the hosting company is, they may take action or they may choose to ignore it, even though legally they are bound by the DMCA in the United States to take action. If the hosting company resides outside of the United States then you have an even bigger problem on your hands. You can get lawyers involved but that all depends on how much you want to spend to defend your work.
Carol,
I am so sorry that happened to you. It sounds terrible to say the least. Intellectual property is big business and it will become even bigger as time goes on. Thank you for sharing your story hopefully it will help others.- Boom Care Squad – Aida Ingram
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Hi there,
I produced a YouTube video with a full transcript of the audio. Some nice person decided to copy the transcript and use in it their blog. I emailed them asking for a link back to the original content but they did not respond, however I did comment and add the link to my video within the comment. I found that this was better than having the content removed as I managed to get traffic through the link.
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This was so nice of this person, right (being sarcastic) :-)…sometimes there is value when someone borrows our work but most of the time, it’s just a hassle and a serious aggravation to boot.
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Hi! I’ve been wondering about this. I use a lot of pics that I find on the internet and wondered how to give credit to those who originally published them. Some are easy; others aren’t. I don’t want to be guilty of “borrowing” while someone else has worked so hard to get these quotes, pics, verses, et cetera up. Any advice for me, Kim? I’d appreciate it because, again, I don’t want to take what isn’t allowed.
Sharing directly from the source is the best way. If you are sharing and don’t know where it originated from, I would recommend NOT doing that. It’s too much of a risk in my opinion. Asking permission and giving attribution is critical to keeping out of hot water.
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I’ve had to file at least 200 DMCA requests for my articles on a content site. Only a few of the websites actually respond to emails, since many of the content scrapers are from India, China, and other foreign countries. Many of the pages were taken down, while others were allowed to exist by Google. Would you know why they would allow some?
Hi there. Very good post Kim. I hate to see my hard work stolen!
The best way to react when you’re stolen text or photos is to file a DMCA Notice with Google that will remove the theft’s URL from SERP. Then you send the notice to web host and ask them to remove the stolen content. Web hosts know you don’t mess with Google and they’ll put the pressure on theaves. It worked well for me.
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I recently saw a commercial video produced in Bulgaria which contained still photo’s, taken by me, that have been taken from wikipedia with no attribution or permission whatsoever, neither to me nor wikipedia. This is simply theft, a company producing professional videos for commercial purposes should know better.
I’m really at a loss as to what action to take, I can’t really demand a recall of all the DVD copies of this video so that they can be replaced by a version with some kind of attribution statement, but I feel I should do something if only to dissuade the company from continually repeating this type of copyright infringement.
You need to hire an attorney and pursue them for a piece of every DVD sale. I am not an attorney but this would be my advice 🙂
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I have had companies from China steal web site content and my diet name, Belly Buster Diet, and create whole web sites and make tons of money off products that the search engines brought them on my merit. Recently I have had problems with a Nevada company that sells a product called Forskolein Belly Buster that is NOT our product but they clearly and intentionally used the name as they did the same thing the Japanese companies have. People who buy the product request refunds and when no one answers the number on the nottle, they call us. We hired an attorney a year ago to handle it who has gotten no where with it as there is no address on the site and no one answers the phone. We had one conversation with one person in there office who said their attorney would call ours… And of course they have not. So I am glad to know we can call Google!!
Uggghhh, it’s a huge problem, Lee. Sorry to hear that you have struggled so with this! Hope you can get it resolved.
Hi Kim. Was wondering if you can recommend some standard text to put at the end of each page/post to warn off people that might be thinking of using your content. I’ve been trying to write something polite and professional sounding but it just doesn’t sound right.
Great topic kim. I have faced this issue several times on my website. I have realised that sometimes the owners of these sites dont even know that that they are doing something wrong, They feel that as long as they link back to you they can copy the entire article word by word (including your images).
I use a htaccess code to block the domain and replace all images that he is hot-linking from my site with a image of my choosing (its usually something very bold and large and that gets the owners attention immediately).
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Hi Kim,
I had someone copying my whole post about “How to clean a mailing list” on his own blog with even using the pictures from my host.
As I got his Facebook profile through his blog, I shared my own post on FB, tagged him in the post and blamed him for the copyright infringement.
It was a matter of a few hours that he took the post offline, with the excuse that he found the post valuable for his audience so he thought to share it with them.
Thanks for pointing out alternative ways to deal with it.
Have a great day,

Torsten
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The CEO of a company that I used to work for literally removed my name from all of the articles that I published to her website and made videos publicly stating how “her articles” can be of reference to all of the company’s instagram and twitter followers. To add insult to injury, one of her employers affixed my legal name to his Youtube videos without my consent just to increase his SEO in Google searches. Unbelievable!
I shared and tweeted it
I’ve had my photo’s stolen numerous times. You often hear it is some kind of flatery but honestly it is downright infuriating to see others mess with what is yours.
You may also get financially conpensated when this happens. I was able to get compensated quit a few times.
I have spent more than 2 years in content marketing and content writing. I have learned a lot in this field. As I started the job as a professional, I launched a website named curata.ir and began presenting services in Persian language. After a while I’m watching a lot of my competitors copying my blog posts and publishing them on their websites, even without changing a word or two. I have checked many websites to learn sth, actually a method for telling google who is the real author or publisher. Finally I found this blog post which is helpful but still not practical in my country. I took some screenshots and posted an article using the pictures. but that’s not definitely enough. I would appreciate if someone could help.
I every time used to study piece of writing in news papers
but now as I am a user of internet so from now I am using net for posts, thanks to web.
Keep on working, great job!
Thanks for the guide! I honestly can’t realize why people do that. Does it show a lack of their own ideas or what?