One of my small websites has been performing quite badly for quite some time – credit control – I have been too busy with other sites to pay it much attention. Last night however I decided to take some time and see what the problem was.
It took about two minutes to find the thieving bastards who have been stealing the content from my site. This is a limited company based in the UK supposedly offering a debt collection service.
I called them this morning to find out why they are thieving bastards. I got to speak to someone who calls himself Steve – apparently Steve has no surname – he hung up on me when I asked for his surname – he would not give any details of who owned the company or if he was one of the directors – information that I can easily find out and publish here when I get pissed off enough.
What does it say about a company who is quite willing to steal content?
So here is the first screen shot – they have had my content in two places so far that I have found. If you click on the image and go down you will see my whole front page still with the links intact – bastards.
And another -this is using the first paragraph of my home page as a search term in Google – oh look who comes out first – the thieving bastards.
And the last screen shot of the page when it was last cashed by Google.
During my conversation with no surname Steve he told me “if we have used your content it was completely unintentional” – bollocks.
Like you just read it and it ends up on your site by complete accident – check this link to the cashed page – it has my site name and links in the content to my site – you dumb feck.
So what can I do?
Really nothing. Yes that is disappointing. I can start contacting there hosting company, complain to Google, contact them,(that didn’t work, he hung up on me) – or I can take what I see as the best action and write this here.
When there is so much choice in the market would you use thieves for for credit control and debt collection – would you trust them. Not me…
UDATE
And the content is off their site – wrote to their host also – no reply on that one yet.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Buddy!!
Stop taking our content, or I’ll report you to your host and get your site taken down. You have ben warned!!
Stop Now or else
Steve
Tenable Solutions Ltd
The thieves now think that the content is theirs – interesting.
They’re not the only ones. Copyscape (see http://www.copyscape.com/) have a plagiarism search engine that you can use to search for sites that are using your content. Along with your friend Steve it also picked up:
http://www.indianmba.com/Faculty_Column/FC757/fc757.html
http://my.88db.com/my/Services/Post_Detail.page/Computers_Internet/ Special_Offer/?PostID=124573
Are they Brits that stole your content?
Steve Rulez!
Ivan give me a break he’s stealing the food from my mouth.
Yeah, brits and some say I’m one – Scottish I’ll have you know
Leslie, it was a joke! Stealing other peoples content is just crazy dumb.
@Garry – that copyscape.com tool is dangerous as well. I just found a number o sites, mostly aggregators sucking the RSS feeds from blog that proudly show my ramblings…
Ivan, I know – so was mine…
One of those days.
Copyscape is great if you get articles written for you. Like so many things i forget about using it for other uses. Thanks for the reminder Gary.
I couldn’t read the samples clearly, but if you really feel that your content was original and they’ve copied it you have to decide what result you would like — just the content removed or compensation.
If you consult with an Intellectual Property lawyer – a specialist is best – he/she can outline your options. The fact that they are in the UK may make it more difficult, but the lawyer may have a UK colleague that can help. A letter from them may be enough to get the content changed on the other site if the offending site fears litigation.
Save all your files and emails between you and the other site.
Google and the hosting company probably will not get involved and required that you work those out between yourselves.
They are ‘smart’ for not responding – or they’d probably just they say never saw your site.
Good luck.
If you click on them they do enlarge – and they have taken the content down – but it still causes indexing and ranking problems, meaning that I will likely re-write the page and some more – but there was more due to be written anyway.
Thanks