Stolen content is probably more prevalent on the internet than most people think. It's so easy to steal content by right clicking and "view source" compared with the task of creating your own... Except when someone steals your content....
With the internet being the vast place that it is, and given that digital information is designed to be copied, it's surprising this doesn't happen more often. But I had to laugh when I saw this shamless content theft from one of the sites I developed at work.
Take a look at http://www.nzflowers.co.nz/faq.php - it's my standard database-driven FAQ page module, wrapped up in a nice template.
Now have a look at http://www.flowerstoturkey.com/florist-faq.asp - notice anything similar?
Not only is the content exactly the same, the HTML code is identical as well. A classic case of "view source" then cut-paste into their own site. As if this wasn't bad enough, they were too slack to proof-read the stolen content. The dead giveaway is the sentence beginning with...
Protecting your privacy is important to Iain Stephens Floral Design
That's right - they forgot to change some of the references to Iain Stephens, which they should have replaced with their own name. A simple CTRL-F would have solved this very easily.
I found their site while doing a google search for "iain stephens floral design" - their site had fairly good rankings for this phrase as it appears 3 times on the page.
A more efficient way of finding "borrowed" content on the web is to use the copyscape search engine. This searches the web for pages that contain copied phrases - well worth looking at if you are worried about your content appearing all over the place. The free version looks for stolen content one page at a time, the paid version will scan your whole site and search for any duplicate or stolen content.
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Comments
Greg - Jul 12, 2006
Oddly, I also found you through the ALA article. That article was awesome, by the way. The PHP was nice enough, but the math involved really blew me away.
Harvey - Jul 12, 2006
Thanks. The teachers at school always said how important it was to understand math - was great to finally use it in a real-world situation for once.
Jason - Jul 13, 2006
well the first thing I thought when I saw the site linked to as "work" was "hey that's a ripoff of http://www.vtwelvedesign.com/"... but that's no longer there.
I assume "work" had something to do with vtwelve then? That was a stellar design that one. Simple and vibrant.
another cheers for the article at ala, thanks!
I assume "work" had something to do with vtwelve then? That was a stellar design that one. Simple and vibrant.
another cheers for the article at ala, thanks!
Antonio - Jul 19, 2006
Hi, found you via ALA.
As a hobby I do the technical stuff in a website, where there's plenty of original content, and we were tired of seeing news and reviews copy&pasted in message boards and other websites.
So I came up with an "antycopy" system that while simple (you can check it in the "noticias" section), has reduced this casual copying almost to zero.
It's easy to "crack" (I know of three different ways to do it) but most of the copy&pasters don't have the time or the drive to look into it.
I had to disable it for GoogleBot or it messed up our indexing, but I'm quite happy with that couple of hours of work
As a hobby I do the technical stuff in a website, where there's plenty of original content, and we were tired of seeing news and reviews copy&pasted in message boards and other websites.
So I came up with an "antycopy" system that while simple (you can check it in the "noticias" section), has reduced this casual copying almost to zero.
It's easy to "crack" (I know of three different ways to do it) but most of the copy&pasters don't have the time or the drive to look into it.
I had to disable it for GoogleBot or it messed up our indexing, but I'm quite happy with that couple of hours of work
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reese - Jul 12, 2006
I recently wrote about this, too, after having a substantial amount of my site swiped. I collected some tips on how to deal with sites that infringe on your copyright. I use copyscape, too. That thing is a godsend!