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Someone copied my article and altered my resource box
kenc138
Posts: 30
Joined: 14 Nov 09
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01 May 10 6:10 am

Someone copied my article and altered my resource box

I'm working at building my backlinks, and I outsourced a high quality article which I posted today on Articles Base.

Out of curiosity, I performed a site: mysite in Google to see how many pages are out there, and I noticed there was a new one.

I went to the website, and whoever runs it copied my article and made a blog post. They also took my resource box and made the font size so you can't read it.

The site is also a PR2, and they put "nofollow" on my links.

To you more experienced IM'ers out there, how do you handle something like this?

Thanks :)
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Last edited by michellerana on 04 May 10 3:04 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: improve title to describe the post better
 

Moderator
wollowra
Posts: 869
Joined: 14 Mar 08
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01 May 10 8:30 am

 Hi Ken,
You can read article base's tos here.. http://www.articlesbase.com/terms-of-use
It says "You must respect the copyright of each author whose articles you wish to publish. This includes but is not limited to 1. Resource Box, 2. Any links provided by the author - all these links must remain intact and not altered in any way." and "You must agree to keep hyperlinks "live" and FOLLOW links so that users can click on said link and be taken to its destination."

I would mail the person who used the article and tell them to either do follow the link and make the resource box more clear or take the article of the site as you own copyright to it.
Just keep in mind that some things can come back to bite you on the backside by people getting their noses out of place and copying your article onto blackhat sites and bad neighbourhoods etc.. or they may even try to do other things .. so it is up to you really what you want to do.
If it were me, I would send the email but be nice about it.
If they don't honor your request then I would just leave it alone.
Maybe other members here can jump in with some more thoughts..

Just my 2 cents.

Regards
Troy
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Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize
they were the big things.

-- Robert Brault
 
kenc138
Posts: 30
Joined: 14 Nov 09
Trust:
01 May 10 8:50 pm

 Hi Troy

Thanks for the post. I took your advice and sent a note to the site owner requesting that he make changes to reflect the ToS. I had to look him up on WHOIS because he has no contact info.

He replied and said that he gave credit where it was due, even though he clearly didn't.

I went ahead and reported him to Google for black hat techniques, duplicate/spammy content and not putting contact information on his site. Hopefully they sort him out. His site is a PR 3, so a "follow" link would have been nice.

Can't win them all I guess.

Thanks for responding :)

Ken
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Moderator
wollowra
Posts: 869
Joined: 14 Mar 08
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02 May 10 12:55 am

 I would think Google really won't take any notice..
You could have asked him to make the link in the resource area more clear as it is the right thing to do.
Anyway.. I wouldn't stress too much about it.. if it is just 1 article or site..
You are going to get people doing this.
Just move on and up. :)

Regards
Troy
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Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize
they were the big things.

-- Robert Brault
 
PremiumMember
sonelt
Posts: 14
Joined: 31 Oct 09
Trust:
05 May 10 1:54 am

 Hey Guys,
I ran into this same problem. I emailed the offender with a firm but respectable demand that he publish my article the way he found it right from Ezinearticles. The SOB cut my resource box totally out and put his own in.

I threaded him with reports to Ezine and to his hosting company.

The next day he published my article in full but added his own link.

It is so frustrating when you work your ass off to provide quality content and someone can't even give you credit.

If you can't come up with your own content then at the very least take the time to rewrite it a little bit?

Although it maybe a form of flattery that someone thinks so highly of your content to put in on their website.

I am sure that this kind of thing goes on all the time, I just try to think that what comes around goes around....you know?

Just my thoughts...I feel for you man!
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Site Admin
aletta
Posts: 3392
Joined: 09 Jul 06
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05 May 10 2:50 am

 At least you can be reasonably confident that they're not going to get any good rankings out of it, being dupe content and all. Pretty sure the article directory will pip them to the post on that count.

I think that having people re-post your article on their site is kind of a "bonus" of article marketing. Getting that first backlink from the actual article directory is the main aim.

I wouldn't waste time on these sorts of people. To paraphrase L'Oreal... they're not worth it.
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