Google, Plagiarizing, and "The Little Guy" - Part 1

Ken's Blog

Plagiarizing of websites runs the gamut. At the "blatant" end of the spectrum, there is the mindless, criminal approach of word-for-word, page-for-page copying.

The opposite end of the range of possibilities involves careful paraphrasing. Far more subtle, the re-wording is detectable upon careful inspection. What gives the offending site away?...

The structure of the content on each page, as well as the structure of the overall copycat site, makes this form of copying obvious. This content thief is simply more careful, willing to work a little to avoid detection by Google.

S/he works the "gray zone" with skill, profiting from spamming-and-scamming an unfortunate minority of hard-working individuals.

Google offered testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet. It delivered an important, principled commitment to protect the Web against those who would profit from the labor of others. More on that to come.

I'm not sure how far that commitment extends to you, the solo proprietor building an online business. This post aims to find out...

If you are a victim of plagiarism who has been unable to cause the offending material to be dropped, either voluntarily by the publisher, the associated Web host, or by Google (dropped from their index), please read on...

Background Information on Copyright Violation

The approach to counteracting copyright violation is well explained at this article for SBI! owners. For non-SBIers, the basic concept is one of escalation, from direct contact with copycats (some do remove the material) to the hosting ISP and ultimately, to the search engines.

This post concerns itself with those rip-off artists who refuse to take down their offending material. You should be able to cause responsible Web hosts to act quickly and remove the site. However, this may prove difficult or impossible, depending on the host (ex., some hosts are in countries that do not comply with international copyright law).

Often, your best chance is Google. Anecdotal experience suggests to me that Google takes down the black-and-white flagrant violators. Fewer of these exist, however, since their life span is indeed getting short. Good news! But bad news...

Google seems less willing to do anything about sites that are less obvious about their plagiarism, especially if you are one of the millions of individuals trying to build an e-business.

Let's find out if that's true. Aside from Google's testimony yesterday, another event precipitated this post...

Google Refuses To Help an Excellent Site

Last week, a site owner contacted us. Her entire site was being paraphrased. A comparison of the two sites left no doubt that the offending site was one big content farm... 100% pap (regurgitated content, taken from the original site).

She told us that she has submitted it to Google DMCA, a program that is meant to deal with this, and that they refused to do anything about it. (I will invite her to comment here to better document this recounting.)

We found it hard to understand how Google could refuse to de-index this site after it was submitted to them through Google DMCA.

Why would they do that? The case was clear-cut. All we could deduce was that 1) this was a clear case, but it was not the "mindless" word-for-word copying and 2) it was not worth the amount of human effort to investigate a case like this for a single person.

There was no doubt about what was happening. Any human inspection would come to the same unequivocal conclusion. Her site was victimized.

In this case, the offending site was an SBIer (yes, I was disappointed). We intervened on behalf of the site owner. The fact that we resolved this quickly and fairly is not relevant...

The fact that Google refused to do so, is. Google seems unwilling to get involved in the "gray zone" of content-copying.

This is why it is so important for "careful paraphrasers" to "avoid detection by Google." They don't really worry if the original author detects them. They know that Google will either miss or do nothing about their activities.

If worse comes to worst, if an ISP takes down the violating site, they simply move their site to another ISP until they find a new host who ignores complaints of copyright violation. That leaves only one resource to defend the Web against this...

Google is the final arbiter. Google now promises a 24-hour turnaround at Google DMCA (assuming you make a high-quality and responsible submission, a reasonable request).

Their increasingly stated commitment to protect original content and the slickness of their process make them the place to start (assuming the plagiarizer refuses to remove the content). Compare this with Bing's process.

I'm impressed. Normally, I'd stop with that statement. But not this time...

Google has lost my confidence, as discussed in previous posts. Their refusal to de-index a site that was clearly plagiarizing is disturbing.

Click here to continue to Part 2, which will give you a clear process to finally rid yourself of parasites (pun intended)!

All the best,