Tips for Dealing with Content Stealers
September 17, 2018
Content on the Internet gets stolen. It is a Reddit trademark, i,e, memes. If you inhabit any part of the fandom community (visit 4chan if you want to have nightmares), then copyright content is plagiarized in fanfiction, fanart, and fan videos. Some cases of fan content have become Internet legends. What do you do, however, if you do not want your content to be stolen and how do you prevent it?
Hacker News Hosted at Y Combinator has a post about, “Dealing with a Competitor Who Is Scraping My Content and Ranking Higher.” Here is the situation:
“One of my competitors has been scrapping my site and providing service to their users without paying anything. And now they surpassed me on Google ranking. I’ve created a website which gets around 5K unique hits every day. It’s a free service for users but I’ve to pay a monthly fee to a third party service provider. Because my site is free for users and doesn’t require users to register it’s been very hard to keep up with this guy. If I change certain things, they counter it immediately and make it work. And they use several proxies to send the request, it’s virtually impossible to block based on IP. Please suggest, if there is anything I’m missing that can be done.”
There are some suggestions such as trap sheets, which is similar to paper towns, where mapmakers include fake streets and towns to identify if any steals their work. Google used something similar when they suspected that Bing was stealing its search results. The proof was in the search results pudding, Bing did scrap the results.
Google also might be helpful in getting them delisted, because the competitor is stealing the content which is illegal. Another suggestion is that the original content writer have the competitor license the original content as an extra revenue stream. Will any of these work?
Whitney Grace, September 17, 2018
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