Dealing with Copy & Paste Gang (Plagiarists)

When I started blogging, the first ever problem I encountered was the “copy and paste gang”. I called them Copy & Paste gang” because of what they have done with my entries. They create their new blogs and since they don’t have anything to write about it they went to my blog then select all the text and images in it then press Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V combo to copy every single letter of the post even the punctuation marks and indention of the entry. What I don’t like about it is that the “culprit” (sorry the word is exaggeration) does not give any credits to your ideas. It seems that they are claiming that your own post is their own idea. This hurt me both by search engine ranking, web traffic and feelings. Imagine you did the brain storming for a single blog post then somebody just get into your blog then copy everything you have done and no simple “TY” or “Thanks” or even a link in return. I admit that I am not really a good writer but my ideas that I’ve been posting in my blogs are my own. Sometimes I copy from other sources but I always make sure that I give back the credits to them and I only quote some part not paste them all at once.

Now, how did I deal with this “plagiarist”? At first I did not do anything about it but every time I think about this incident I can’t stop from uttering “bad words”. So I promised to myself that I will do anything to let them pay about this. How can you determine if your a victim of this copy & paste group? You can make use of the website Copyscape.com to search for articles, posts or websites who copied your content. Copyscape also features a comprehensive advice and suggestion on how to deal with this copy-paste people. If you want automatic prevention of copy-paste, there’s a website that accepts a minimal fee for their service. It is also found on the said website.

Here are some of the suggestions that I use to deal with this kind of problem (which I based on Copyscape’s advice):

1. You can send email to the author or the webmaster of the site to inform him about this and try to tell him to remove the content. Me, honestly I don’t like to do this because I know he will not read my email and definitely will not follow my request or even respond to it. So I’d rather consider the 2nd advice which is to;
2. Inform the web hosting or the blog host regarding their client’s abuse. This is what I did with the recent copy and paste incident I encountered. I trace the website through Whois then email the admin and they immediately closed down the “rascal”. In his face!;
3. Now if you want to remove the said site to indexes of search engines, you can report it to Google via the Google Webmaster Central and file it as a spam. Google will take action if you have basis with your report and ban the website immediately. Copyscape suggested that you make use of the Internet Archive to prove it to search engines that you made the posts earlier than the offending website.

That’s it! Deal with them so that they will be no one like them left in this planet.