These two simple steps may help

As writers, we put in a great deal of time and effort to write out articles. The last thing we want is for someone to copy our articles and pass them off as their own. Unfortunately, it does happen.

I just read a story about how someone has copied a few of her articles and added them to their own website. It’s worth reading what happened and checking the website involved to see if your work has also been copied.

What can you do if this happens to you?

You have two many options for trying to get the content taken down.

Option #1

You can report the copyright infringement to Google. If you do this, they should de-index the pages involved. They may even de-index the whole site if the offender is a serial copyright infringer.

This means they won’t get any Google search traffic to those pages. It won’t take your articles down, though.

You can report the infringement at support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905.

You can also find further information at the Google Copyright Help Center.

Option #2

The second option is to contact the copyright infringer directly. This isn’t usually possible because they tend to hide their contact details. It is worth trying, though.

If the website doesn’t have contact details, you can try to find out who the domain owner is by using the website below. Unfortunately, domain names are usually hidden behind domain privacy protection, so you’re unable to see the details.

If you go to whois.com and type in the offending website name in the upper right of the screen, you will be able to see the owner details if they’re not hidden.

In the case of the website mentioned in the above article, the name, address, email, and phone number of the owner are visible.

If you can see the number, you can contact them and tell them to remove the offending articles right away. Often they’ll take them down once they know they’ve been caught.

I hope this is of some help to anyone here that’s unfortunate enough to have their articles copied.