Hands off Work from Home Wisdom
Work from Home Wisdom is scraped
Yesterday I happened to receive an email with a link to a tool that can spot if your website has been copied, or scraped, as it’s called. I forwarded it to A as I always do with techie things, not thinking any more about it until he came into my office later to tell me that someone scraped Work from Home Wisdom earlier this month.
This fake site he discovered has no Alexa ranking and none of the images, and all the internal links have been changed to the fraudulent domain. But my contact details have been left in place, and to add insult to injury my copyright notice remains at the bottom of the page.
A emailed the company that’s responsible for the domain name, but they came straight back with a long email that basically said it’s not their problem. The details they have of the site owner are obviously fake, no more than a string of random letters, and an address on an uninhabited Antarctic island. But they did give us the name of the hosting company, which is our next contact point.
Obviously I’m angry that someone has stolen my original Work from Home Wisdom content, but I’m more concerned that they may use it to spam people or infect their computers. I’m also spitting that we now have to spend time we can’t spare to try and get it taken down.
You can check your own site by using Copyscape, which checks for plagiarism and duplicate content. If you find you have a problem, have a look at this helpful article that tells you what to do about it – Copyright Violation: What to Do when Someone Copies Your Web Site.
I love the internet but this kind of behaviour is beneath contempt.
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Don’t take it personally. It means you are writing copy that means something. The internet is an open forum and anything can and will be stolen.
My view is to take it as a compliment and to make sure that there is a link back to your own site in every post (there are wordpress plugins that can add a footer to every post and/or RSS feed that do this too). That way, if someone steals your content they are at least giving you some free Google juice by linking back to your site 🙂
Just my 0.02 GBP
Thanks for the positive take, Dan. Just shows there is always another way to look at things! I think there are internal links in pretty much all the posts actually. And in the meantime my one-man IT dept is on the case 🙂
It’s not fair or right that someone steals the work you put so much effort into. Unfortunately it’s all too common. Hope it gets sorted soon for you Judy
Thanks, Sharon, A has got his deerstalker on and is tracking down the offender 🙂
Sorry to hear that Judy – there are some scrupulous people out there in internet land! I’ve just started a new website and am learning about security woes etc everyday – thanks for this extra bit of info!
Congrats on the new site, Kerry, and I’m glad I was able to provide a timely piece of info. There is always something new to learn about the internet!
I’m sorry to hear about your copyright issue, Judy. A similar thing happened to me and I was able to shut the guy’s account down in three days. His site was hosted by GoDaddy and when I showed them the similarities, the site was no longer live. I sent a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to GoDaddy and the site owner. That resolved the issue. The company hosting the site should be responsible for taking it down. I hope everything is resolved soon.
That was quick, Lisa! We’re still pursuing it. People have been very sympathetic so we’ll keep you all updated on progress.
Good luck with getting it sorted Judy- like you say you have other things to be doing with your time…. Please keep us posted!
Thanks, Francesca, I’ll certainly post about our experiences and what we learn. I hope it won’t be too long.