The Fight against Copyright Infringement

It has been a year long fight for me. My blog contents have been fully copied over to a website(s) without my permission. The infringing website has been copying contents from multiple websites of my niche.

I wonder what is the true intention for it to do so. On the surface, it may seem like a good idea to consolidate all the articles in one place, but this is outright copyright infringement.

And I believe this is hurting the SEO and ranking of all the original content owners.

I asked ChatGPT for some insight and this summary is what I have got (accurate or not, most likely?)

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Content Removal Request with Google

It took me a while to figure out how to request for a content takedown and also to find time to do it.

I am thankful that requesting for a content takedown is relatively easy on Google side and they take action fast. And I really appreciate Google even emailing me back that they are taking action and also provided me with further suggestion.

You see, my situation went beyond just 1 website. There were actually 2 websites belonging to the same perpetrator cloning my content.

I can't do anything to the 1st website as it is his own domain. But the 2nd website was done via Weebly dot com.

Google team was quick to point out to me that I can actually raise a DMCA request in Weebly to remove the content.

So while Google team helped me on the search engine part, they also guided me how to take down the content at source.

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Content Takedown Request with Weebly

And so, I proceeded to raise a DMCA request in Weebly's website. But the form wasn't responsive after I click on "Submit Notification". The form just reset and nothing happens.

After trying a few times, I was lucky to find that I can actually email to Weebly's Support to request for the takedown. And in just a day's time, I got a reply that they are taking action against their "customer".

And upon checking those infringing URLs that copied my content just a while ago, I was glad to find that they are all removed from Weebly's site. And the best part is the entire infringing website is now in 404 status. Weebly team went beyond just deleting the infringing content URL that I reported. It removed the entire site.

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Content Removal Request in Bing / Yahoo

Now, actually, I got to thank Bing because it was through Bing that I found out about the infringing websites.

Blog posts that we write are often more easily ranked in Bing and Yahoo than Google. And while I was using Jaaxy to track my rankings, that was how I first noticed my blog posts were stolen, where the infringing content duplicated from my website was appearing in ranking just below mine, or sometimes ranking better than mine!

But the unfortunate part is, while Bing has a similar content removal request form like Google, I got no response or any logs in their Dashboard even though I have submitted the takedown request.

So the infringing website contents are still ranking on Bing / Yahoo side. I have yet to figure out how I can email to Bing support. If you are reading this and know how to, I hope you can also share with me.

Update: 18 May 2023 (3.20pm GMT +8) - approx 3 hrs after initial post

I rechecked all the notifications I have raised on Bing. 1 of them got approved and I finally see something in the Submitter Dashboard. The others are pending or closed without approved status. The latter is somewhat puzzling. Most of these tickets were raised on 13 May, so it took about 5 days (or earlier) to see some updates.

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Lessons Learned

In running our online business, we need to spend some time to play defense. Unfortunately, there are always someone up to no good trying to harm you / your business.

At least I have now learned a little bit more how to protect myself online, not a lot, but trying to improve 1% every day among other things.

Thanks also to Kyle for highlighting to me how to raise a content takedown request when I seek help that my google traffic tanked 99% last year. I do not know whether it was due to the duplicate content issue, or was it because of the Google algorithm updates which it coincided with. My blogging frequency isn't really stable so I couldn't really complain in that sense.

Regardless, I hope this doesn't happen to any of you but maybe you can keep a lookout once in a while. Bing could be a good starting point to do detection.

I sincerely hope I have less of these so that I can focus on learning the ropes how to write faster, design things better, and truly make a living from doing online business.

Thank you for reading this. I welcome any suggestions and feedbacks.

Regards,
Richard