Theft of my website - maybe

[Ian J]

One of the problems of being well rated by Google is that competitors are always examining my site and I notice bits of site code or phrases that I have used popping up in other people's sites.

One chappie even copied two whole pages of my site word for word onto his own site but luckily someone pointed it out to me and I politely asked him to remove my content.

Earlier this week I noticed a lot of unusual activity on my site from Brazil and this was of the sort that normally indicates that someone was downloading all of the pages. The referring url was [url]http://www.atffactoring.com.br/[url] but when I checked on the link all I got was "Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed."

I have a tracker on many pages of the site and it was returning results saying that the referrer was [url]http://www.atffactoring.com.br/factoring_concerns.htm[url] which is one of my file names tacked onto the end of the Brazilian domain. I guess that he had downloaded my site, kept the structure intact but had just renamed the domain itself.

I am a factoring broker and my website deals with factoring and factoring problems within the UK. Brazil is a Portugese speaking country where the factoring industry is run completely differently without a broking structure at all so the text on my site won't be at all relevant to Brazil.

I guess that [url]www.atffactoring.com.br[url] is something to do with factoring due to the name but in view of the difference in language and commerical structure I can't see any benefit that they would have gained by downloading and analysing my site to such a great extent.

Or am I missing something

[peterjhale]

There's a lot of talk about duplicate content for google users

Even my site has been affected

If google finds duplicate content both pages will be affected as it does not know which is the right page

So you should be concerned

We know google is looking into standard 302 redirects which are affecting a lot of folks right now.

If the site you describes goes live and you get knocked on your content, the best way is to contact the host and serve notice to have the site taken down

[Eagle]

What's the score on a site having a .co.uk and a .com? Are they penalised? Is it duplicate content?...

Cheers,

Mark

[peterjhale]

If you have a .com and .co.uk seperately hosted with the same content you are toast for both sites

Have one site up and the other domain 301 directed to the first

[Eagle]

I've got a redirect. Thanks.

[Inzvestor]

Have you put copyright notices on your page ?

Serve them notice of copyright infringement.
A carefully worded letter may encourage them to remove the pages.

It is likely that they will have them translated (locally) into Portugese.

[yorganic]

As other member have pointed out this is dangerous.

To monitor things you could try setting up a Google alert to monitor whether your unique text appears on other sites.

Go to http://www.google.co.uk/alerts?t=3&hl=en_GB and instead of inserting keywords insert a text string of a reasonable length that is taken form your site. Sit back and wait for Google to send you an email although it could take some time as it is based on the site in question appearing in the rankings.

However, if you know what the exact site is then I know another company that have written scripts for me to monitor this kind of thing before - http://www.ultimathule.net maybe try them. They did me a good job once on collecting evidence about somebody stealing one of my clients affiliate traffic via Tradedoubler.

Good luck in defending your site

[Ian J]

Well he has surfaced at last and his website at www dot atffactoring.com.br is now online using my graphics and menu system although the text is very different in style.

I don't suppose that I can legally do anything about it economically but I will probably contact the company and tell them that unless they change their website I will contact the major funding providers in Brazil and ask them whether they are happy doing business with a company that steals copyrighted material.

[Ian J]

I sent them a couple of emails complaining about the theft of my copyright which they ignored so I copied their own page into my own website and added the phrase "This website has been stolen from Factoring Solutions UK - what will they steal from you" sent them another email telling them what I had done and within a couple of hours a completely different website had appeared in Brazil.

I received an email from the web "designer" telling me that he had purchased a CD with web templates on it and the site that they used had been one of the templates.

That may have had the ring of truth about it if my tracker hadn't highlighted every page of my site being closely scrutinized by ATF Factoring Brazil

[peterjhale]

Ian

Find the whois information of the site and try and find who they are hosted with

Then send the hosting company a note

Normally hosting companies are good and take the site down