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It is highly likely that the better the quality of your online content is and the more visible it is the more likely it is to be borrowed, stolen, used and abused! While there is direct benefit to you when other quality sites copy your content, give you credit and link back to your website or posts on other sites, the following information is about more blatant abuse. Many of these areas are grey legally, but the "average person" would understand that "there is something rotten" going on!
Your Articles on Article Submission Sites
There are various websites that will accept your articles for inclusion on their sites. The high quality sites will only accept articles that fall into quality guidelines. These sites generally get great exposure for your articles (which link back to your site) and equally great exposure for folks looking for content to misuse. An example is EzineArticles.com, which has a very clear policy on how other sites can use your articles.
Even with this policy clearly stated, here are two sites that took the first paragraph of one of my articles and misused it. In both cases, the motive is to get search engines to catalog the site and get revenue from Yahoo or Google ads. It worked because these two sites were found through a Google search!
The title and paragraph are taken from my article on EzineArticles.com. The article is alson on the NNFP.org site, but that site does not make it as easy to grab the article. This page was on professional-web-design.us. Each of the keywords in my article opens another ad that they get payment for. Notice that the page doesn't actually have any real content! Every place that you can click on these pages are PPC ads - they could be YOUR PPC ads.
This one is interesting because it gets people to enter their email address, as if it were a real comment site! It's like handing your valuables to a burglar! Again, the title and first paragraph came from one of my EzineArticles.com submissions. I contacted Hostgator about the fact that they have their ad on such a phony site. They responded:
"We take copyright claim very seriously. Here is a guide to creating a copyright infringement claim http://hostgator.com/copyright.shtml I apologize about the inconvenience this might cause. Feel free to contact us if you have any further request/question. Thank you for contacting HostGator.com"
In reality, to do anything about it, I have to put everything in writing as if it were a legal claim. It's not like they are going, "Oh, no, we have our ads on an illegitimate site. We need to follow up on this!" Just that tells you something about the type of company Hostgator is!
Discussion about this topic between web professionals
This article is based on a discussion topic from the Social Networking for Business course
at Dickinson Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, Montana
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© 2011, Nora McDougall-Collins