Protect Your Website’s Content
In recent weeks, I had discovered that our main site, http://www.barbervasolutions.com/ had been plagairized. The offender had stolen several of our pages’s content almost word for word (including a typo). This is web content that I took great care and lots of time developing to convey my VA business’s message. I was shocked and saddened that someone had done this, especially since this person is someone who works within the same VA industry.
I was a victim of “copy-and-paste plagiarism”. Taking one’s content from their website and without their expressed permission, putting it on your website representing it as your own work is not only wrong, but it is illegal and against federal copyright law. Not only could someone take legal action against you, but your site may be banned by search engines as well. When developing your own website content, it may be useful to use other sites similar to yours as a frame of reference or inspiration, but be careful to craft your content in your own words.
How do you make sure your site is protected from plagiarism? Copyscape to the rescue! A free tool from Copyscape.com can be used to help find possible word-for-word plagiarism of your site. Just put in the page url and search. You can also place this banner 
on all of your pages to warn others not to copy your site. Copyscape also provides premium services that will regularly check your site for content theft.
What do you do if you found someone that plagiarized your site? If you have found someone that has stolen your content, you must act quickly. It may be best to first consult an attorney for legal advice or to draft necessary documents. The first thing you should do is investigate as much as possible and keep thurough records to document what content has been stolen. You can do a Whois search to find the contact information of the sites owner and their hosting company. All that you may need to do is send them a polite email informing them to take down the content from the site. For more in-depth information about responding to plagairism, check out http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php or copyscape’s resource center.
After we had sent the offender a simple cease and desist email, the content had been removed and we were given a sincere apology.
Remember to protect your rights and fight against online plagiarism.
