I know there has been a lot of talk about stolen content. Anybody that steals content should be punished by having their site banned by Google and their hosting company taking their website down. Unfortunately, this happens so often every single day that it is nearly impossible for it to happen. First, just actually finding the content is difficult, and then taking actions to get the site penalized, is even harder. Honestly, people steal ideas all the time for blogging. If you say that you haven’t then you probably just haven’t realized that you do it. I’ve taken ideas that people blogged about and wrote my own post about it. But that is the biggest difference, I write my OWN post about it and gave mention to the person who wrote it the first time or came up with the idea. (For example, this post has been talked about by fellow D-OC’ers, this isn’t my idea to just write about this today)
Let’s look at the good side of this first, and this relies on an if. IF the person stealing the content has a link back to your site, then they are at least giving you credit where credit is due. Also, let’s look at the technical side of this stuff and why they are stealing the content. This becomes a search engine 101 reason. The more content you have on your site about what you are selling or what your site is about, the higher Google will rank you, bottom line. Here’s the catch. Google does not like duplicate content. If there is the same content on 2 different pages on the internet, Google will only show one of them. Guess what, if you posted it first and your site has more authority for the post, which it will especially if there is a link back to your site, then Google is not even going to show the stealers website! So people are not even going to see the content anyway. And once Google finds this out, they will ban a site, pretty much forever, then its game over.
The bad part is obviously when somebody steals the content and they don’t give you the credit for it. Scott had a great blog post about things you can do and the proper steps to take in order to get the website down.