Combat Plagiarism with SEO

Posted by Marios Alexandrou, SEO Resume.

A while back I wrote about how I discovered that portions of my site were being plagiarized by other web site owners. In that same post I described the creation of a Plagiarism Hall of Shame where I included screenshots, contact info, and commentary about the offending site. My hope was that eventually the site owners would find my site and react to my accusations. Well my plan worked.

In the last couple of weeks I've received e-mails from two offending site owners indicating that the copied content had been removed. I'm not sure what I expected in the way of an explanation, but here's what I got (name's withheld as I'm not here to make anyone look bad).

I was shocked to see a link to the [company name] in your site yesterday.

I figured it was worth noting the content you describe on your site re: [company name] has been deleted. I have been with [company name] for 2+ years and was unaware of the issue you describe. I am sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused you.

And here's the second e-mail I received.

I apologize. My husband created it for me. I thought it was nice. He has shut the site down.

Now presumably these people wouldn't have found my site had I not applied some SEO to the hall of shame. So there's another use for SEO.

Related SEO/SEM Articles: