By Garry Conn - Sat, Mar 16 2013, 9:00pm CDT
If you have a WordPress blog or other type of site that has an RSS feed and you've discovered that your content is being syndicated on a splog (spam blog) website, and your content actually ranks better on the splog site instead of yours, you don't have to take that. That's content theft in my opinion. And dealing with getting the content removed isn't too difficult of a process.
There is a website, kingged.com, that was syndicating my content and robbing me of my Google ranking. I searched the website for a contact page or email address so that I could contact the owner to put in a request to have my syndicated content removed. But no form or no published email address could be found.
I then decided to add an entry in my .htaccess file which basically redirected kingged.com to a bogus URL each time it tried to ping my website for newly published content. This didn't work because kingged.com was pinging my FeedBurner URL instead.
My third, last resort, and final attempt to put a stop to having my content stolen was to submit a DMCA request on kingged.com. And to really make sure this worked, I submitted this request into the domain register company, web hosting company and also Google. Less than 12 hours, the web hosting provider responded and immediately shut down the website. At this point I was told that kingged.com has 14 days to fulfill my request or to counter. In the meantime, it seems that their website is offline during this process.
This is copy of the Take Down notice I sent out: I used the DMCA Generator. Using the generator took all the complications out of filling out a DMCA request.
Less than 12 hours after sending this out, I got a response. Apparently, my request was forwarded to HostGator.com. I am very impressed with how efficient and professional they handled this matter. Here's a screenshot of the email I received:
And then literally, as I was writing this post, I received a final follow up response from HostGator informing me that all of my stolen content has been removed from Kingged.com.
This has happened to me for many years. I always assumed that getting stolen content removed from other websites was a difficult process. Because of that assumption, I never did anything about it. The thing that motivated me to take action against Kingged.com is the fact that I have been working very hard at re-establishing my websites in Google.
I am in process with resolving some penalty issues. My own content at the moment doesn't pull up in Google's first page SERPs. Because of that, I was easily able to spot my article in the SERP published on Kingged.com. So, I guess getting penalized by Google in some very rare occasions does have its benefits. Here's an example below:
At any rate, if you discover a splog website stealing your content and you want to put a stop to it, let me know... I'll be happy to help you out. The process of having my stolen content removed from their website took less than 12 hours. This website literally had stolen 25 or MORE articles that I wrote.
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