There’s an interesting thread going on over at High Rankings Forum. A poster claims his friend used another person’s site, made minor changes and is now being sued because the original site owner claims he was penalized by Google. This is becoming a hot-and-heavy issue.
Where’s Matt Cutts when you need him? Hey, Matt! Do you have any insights on whether this could/has happened?
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I’d like to know if any readers have ever had copy stolen. Answer the poll in the right-hand sidebar and let me know.
Matt did reply to my email and said:
“There’s not really enough specifics to know for sure either way. The
original poster mentions some copying, but doesn’t say exactly how
much. The letter from lawyerfolk sounds unrealistic though. If we get
a copyright legal complaint, that would normally result in a removal +
a DMCA message at the bottom of the page. But I’d need to know the
site and more background info to say for sure.”
Matt
I’ll say this, I am a copyright and plagiarism consultant. I would say that most of my non-corporate clients, meaning those not having me test software, etc. are those that are having SEO problems due to duplicate content. They’re looking for my help in getting the infringing sites removed or at least preventing them from injuring them in the results.
I see it a lot with store fronts, ebook marketers and other consultants. There’s a big problem with it in the Virtual Assistant community, for example. The issue there is that there are good VAs that open up shop and create their own marketing promotion and then others who come along, take it that work and score higher in Google with it.
So can it happen? Yes. Does it happen with every infringement? No. Google does a decent job in most cases telling the infringer from the original. That’s great. But there’s the small percentage of cases that it screws up, those are the ones where my site seems to be on the bookmark list.
That’s how I’ve seen it and I think most SEO types would agree with it for the most part. However, I’m sure individual experiences will vary.
Welcome Jonathan. Thanks for the great feedback.