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How to report for blog posts plagiarism?

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So, yesterday in the evening, I came to know about a site which was copying my articles, thanks to Bhumika, Tapaswini and Dipti 🙂 I don’t want to link to the spammy website so linking to the fb discussion here: http://www.facebook.com/bhumikanewlove/posts/449804748378868. I checked out the website and there was no contact info and their twitter and fb links were not working. So, I was a little clueless as to what should I do.
So, Google becomes God at such times 🙂 I found out this very nice blog post on reporting plagiarism. I checked out the website which was copying my articles was hosted on wordpress so I went to the wordpress spam report link and submitted the report but the report was not exactly submitted as they did not recognise the website as wordpress one. But, it did give me a complete information on who the website belonged to, the hosting service and the e-mail address of the owner.
So, I contacted the owner and told him about this. And, fortunately (as of now), the owner is nice, he replied immediately and said he would delete the articles. I will paste a snippet of the conversation as well.

Me: I am the owner of the blog ‘Perfect Skin Care for you’. I recently came across your website today and noticed that you had copied many of my recent articles. I request you to remove those articles from the website. And, kindly do not paste any of my articles without prior permission.

Owner of the website: will do. It was an autoblog someone set up for me a while back. I’ll delete them in due course. Give me some time.

Me: Kindly delete all my articles in at most a week. Btw, I didn’t know that websites copy articles automatically from blogs!!! Do tell me sometime how it works.

Owner of the website: Well, its simple. There are many wordpress plugins they utilise. It automatically searches the internet for related material to the website and automatically posts it.

This was like a reality check for me that not only robot scripts are written to automate plagiarism but such plugins are freely available in wordpress. So, if you find any website (and not a blog) copying your content, you can be assured that its the robot scripts running. So, what steps you should take:
  • Contact the author of the blog / website through Contact Us page. Most of the times, it wouldn’t be available because they are spam blogs and websites. 
  • Check which platform is it hosted on. And, contact the spam reporting team of the platform. You will find this information in the blog post I referred to above. 
  • If its a website with a proper domain name (which it will be most of the time), go to http://whois.domaintools.com/ and paste the website link in the search bar given there. It will display all the information about the website including the owner name, the e-mail address with which it was created and even the hosting server of the website. 
  • Now, your work gets easier. Email the owner of the website. If you get no response within a week, I would suggest you to contact the hosting servers regarding the plagiarism issue.
And, when I was writing this post, Padmaja posted another link. So, off to another mission!!! Adios, folks till tomorrow. And, readers of all blogs, please contact the blogger if you find their duplicate posts anywhere online. It would really help all of us.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

    • don’t worry, Taps!!! everything has its good and bad. at least we now know how to report for it 🙂 and, don’t lose your sleep on it. not worth it at all!!! but, the guest blogging thingy is even worse 🙁 you know I was thinking of inviting guest posts but now, I think I will take a little more time.

      Reply

  2. Gosh.. Even I didn’t know other websites could copy your posts..But how to figure out if your posts are used by someone else !!! :O

    But thanks for the informative post 🙂

    Reply

    • hey Nitika…plagiarism is synonymous to internet 😀 you can check out here: http://www.copyscape.com/
      but, the worst is that you can’t copy paste every link in your blog /website to see if there are copies 🙁 rely on your readers and blogging frens to spot the duplicates.

      Reply

  5. thanx so much for doing this post swati,,am bookmarking this..auto copying ! dat scares ! :<

    Reply

  6. You will see a lot more of these. Got tired of chasing every and all people who copy my posts. I just take comfort in the fact that they can’t steal the mind behind it.

    Sometimes, if you have a blog feed, the feed automatically posts to their site.

    Anyway, it’s a good thing google changed its algorithm. It checks for duplicate entries and punishes those who duplicated your articles.

    Reply

  7. This is getting so common these days & really irritates when your hardwork is copied withoutany notification. People have lost the sense of their own originality

    Reply

    • hey Shrilata 🙂 oh yeah, I checked that post…I think you posted it on fb or something. yes, its quite sad that people don’t value other’s work and give due credits.

      Reply

  9. Same thing happened with the other blog also.. the duplicate blogger even copied the picture with the watermark of the Original blog and published.. it..

    People are stealing others hardwork.. really bad..

    It nearly takes more than three hours to create a post with pics.. but these dupes easily stealing others work.. too bad..

    Reply

  12. Ok… yesterday I missed this… actually there are quite many websites which deal with a particular topic and post links from various blogs/websites which write about that particular topic… So, I guess skincare info is one such site… But thing is they just need to display the link which when clicked needs to redirect to the original blog/website…

    But the link i posted seems like a direct lift… guess the blogger was doing a copy paste of various posts and testing his/her site… Surprising that your post is dated 19th July 2011 and that post is dated 18th July 2011

    Swati, can you please correct my name in the post 🙁

    Reply

    • oh I am sooooooo sorry!!! I did proof reading but couldn’t pick that up. yes the link you pointed has copy pasted the post. yeah, they should actually post a paragraph and then give link to the original post but how many do that?????
      yeah, that guy must have changed the date (you can do that in scheduling blog posts) so that google considers his post original as it is dated before….but, I don’t think google algorithm considers date!!! I think it considers the date of headers of the posts instead. sorry if I am not making sense 😀

      Reply

    • dont mind 🙂

      anything and everything can be changed these days…
      The lifted posts have your water mark pics… imagine where they lift what you have written, make a change here and there and present it as original.. thats more annoying…

      These things are common…like it or not need to deal wid it

      Reply

    • haha….yup, if they had cropped the pics, that would have been too bad!!! aaahh…I know these are common and they don’t really bother me but yup duplicity of content is not good for search engines…they can spam it!!! anyways, not an issue….it comes an goes and who knows where all my posts can be found??? internet is so huge after all.

      Reply

  13. This is so freaking now I am a bit scared about this fact…. hope google helps us in such terms… and Swati I just checked their website even this post of yours is visible on their site…!!

    Reply

    • haha…apparently, it takes my feeds and publishes it automatically…I’ll give the guy a week and lets hope he deletes my posts within that time!!!

      Reply

  14. The last 2 times someone guest blogged on my site, even they had stolen material and the blogger was very happy to call me Ames.. Lol now I don’t invite or I’m not even guest blogging for someone else. It’s just so freaky :((

    Reply

  16. i always see blog posts everywhere on the net… i mean lifted ones… but i thought it was normal… i dont know blog mechanics and all.. ya.. whatever u write goes into webworld and anybody can lift it i guess…

    Reply

    • hey..yeah, that’s true but could you please tell me if you ever spot my posts anywhere???? it would help contain copyright violations and spamming!!!

      Reply

  18. The exact same thing happened to me — except that the person didn’t reply to my emails and comments on his/her website! It flared me up and I couldn’t sleep. Good thing Google does a very efficient job of deleting illegally duplicated posts, if they were published on one of google’s platforms.

    Unfortunately, right now there is no way by which I can track who copies my content. I just rely on myself and my readers to inform me, just in case.

    Reply

    • hey Vivi…google doesn’t delete!!! one of my posts is still on in a blogspot blog 🙁 good that the guy took even my pics as they were so they have watermarks but still I would prefer that to be deleted. I have reported the blog to blogspot spam….let’s see if anything happens!!!

      Reply

    • Swati, google will only delete if you report… and the reporting process is a bit tedious but I went through it coz the person who copied my posts weren’t replying to me.

      Reply

  20. Hello…
    I also faced the same situation…somebody copied my entire blog to a scrappy blog…i just complaint the whole situation to google…under copyright infraigment
    Google..deleted the blog in 7 days..and de indexed the posts

    Reply

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