Help! A site has copied my blog!
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My site tanked on July 21 and I have been working so hard to bring it back up but nothing is working. Today I looked at "Links to Your Site" on Google Webmasters and I see a copy of my site on another URL.
mysite.eemovies.org/mycategory/mypost
The domain name is eemovies.org and then all my stuff is wrapped around it and all my content is there! How do I stop this?!
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Thanks for this excellent answer. I did a search and my site is the only one that came up in the results. The scraper site is not loading so I guess it is gone.
I think I have the rel="canonical" tags on all my pages because I have the Wordpress SEO by yoast plugin.
Thanks so much because I really don't have time for letters and lawyers.
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Here's one way to tell if this site is hurting you:
Do a search for some of your unique content (wrap it in "quotes" for exact match) and see what site ranks higher. If the scraper site ranks higher than yours, then you definitely have a problem and should follow Lesley's advice here.
Also, make sure you place proper rel="canonical" tags on all your pages. Oftentimes a scraper will scrape everything, including the canonicals, giving you credit for the content.
Most of the time, scraped content is nothing to worry about. Most sites over a certain size get scraped and the content published elsewhere. It's quite possible your dip in rankings wasn't caused by this site (although I can't rule it out) so it's best to keep looking everywhere you can.
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Normally if you send a strong worded cease and desist to that webmaster , it should work and you aviod the costs associated with a lawyer. If that does not work, then i would go with Lesley and Ron's suggestions.
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If you need to do a DMCA takedown request I would suggest using a lawyer as this seems to carry more weight with whomever is violating. If the site has a DMCA page and they have filled out the paperwork they only 5-10 days to take down the offending content before they incur more liability.
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Disavow the links in Google, then send a DCMA take down request to both the host and to the site owner. If you can link to the internet archives showing how old your material is. If that fails, hire a lawyer in the jurisdiction of where the host is and have them send a letter. Also it might be helpful to have it pointed out in the letter that they are in the same jurisdiction too.
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