Hey guys, I was wondering if you could help me out with this.

When I first started my Atlanta real estate website a few years ago, I paid a guy out of California to write some copy for me. After he got my money, I waited a coupe of weeks and he added a lot of great content to my site. Sounds great, right? Well I started receiving nasty calls and emails from local agents that were accusing me of ripping off their site. Turns out this fool just did a bunch of copy and paste jobs from local sites that ranked well. So I was out $300 and stuck with a bunch of copyrighted info. After I removed it all, I re-did the content all myself.

Fast-forward to today. My site ranks in the top 1-5 for most of my key cities, including top 10 for "Atlanta Real Estate". I am now the target of numerous copyright attempts on a weekly basis. I even have a fancy cease and desist letter that I use for all of my thief's. Most of the time people get scared and remove it immediately, but occasionally you get your "grandma" type that has no idea what you are talking about. I have recently added a fancy disclaimer at the bottom of my pages that goes over my copyrights and has the copy-scape logo near it. What pisses me off is the amount of time it takes to do these numerous emails every week. Does anyone have any advice on what I can do to prevent this from happening or reducing it? Thanks in advance for your help!

__________________
Mike Giraldi, REALTOR® - Solid Source Realty Atlanta
Direct - 770.361.8659

Search all Atlanta real estate for sale including residential, commercial and land. Locate homes for sale in the Cumming, GA real estate and Canton Real Estate markets.

Other than hiring a hit man? No clue. I think it will happen no matter what - there isn't really a way to stop it.

__________________
Nicholas May
Creative Linking Team
Real Estate Webmasters

LOL.....Nick I need an SEO hitman.

Does the dupe content hurt me?? Or do I not get penalized becuase Google cached it first on my site?

__________________
Mike Giraldi, REALTOR® - Solid Source Realty Atlanta
Direct - 770.361.8659

Search all Atlanta real estate for sale including residential, commercial and land. Locate homes for sale in the Cumming, GA real estate and Canton Real Estate markets.

It's not really who has it up first, it is who has the most authority - presumably those who are stealing content are clueless of what it takes to develop true authority, so likely not much harm (Other than if you don't protect your copyright, it gets diluted and sooner or later you cannot protect it any longer)

I WOULD worry if a more authoritative site took your content, as they have a legit chance of usurping you.

__________________
Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles [Of Google] will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. Google.com

Take it as a complement. But yeah its not fair.

__________________
Alex G.
Portland Real Estate and Gresham Real Estate. FREE LIST OF BPO COMPANIES

You can determine if your content is being ripped off by pasting entire sentences of your unique writing into a google search.

Over the years, I've caught many agents stealing my FAQ content. I send them a stern letter and have never had one not take the content down. Usually, it was as the op stated, they hired someone else or had an employee doing it and the Broker had no idea it was stolen content.

The other way I've caught people is when they are so dumb they forgot to change the image links for the "up" arrows I use to use, and I'd see the hits on my web stats and find them like that.

Steve

__________________
Austin TX Real Estate - Austin Real Estate Blog
Austin Realtor Since 1990 Residential and Investment Sales

That is too funny, Steve, them stealing from you but still linking to your site. Talk about a backfired attempt on their part!
Some people...

Mike - Clearly you need to stop writing great content... Nobody likes to steal crap!

Really, I think that you are doing the right thing by having a fancy cease and desist letter. There is very little you can do to avoid it, other than my great idea of writing bad content.

__________________
Ryan A. Martin - Windermere Real Estate / Whatcom Inc.

Your Bellingham real estate professional specializing in the listing and sales of Bellingham condos. Also check out my Anacortes real estate website for information about Fidalgo Island and Anacortes, WA

What has helped me is disabling the right mouse click. Most of us know the work around for that, however, many do not.

On the sites where I do not have the right mouse click disabled, I have issues of content theft.

Just a thought.

__________________

This is a great idea.

Chances are, the people stealing your content are either semi-web savvy jerks or people who never touch computers and think such acts are okay. Can't really get around the big jerks... but usually people who don't spend that much time on computers don't know about Ctrl + C

__________________
Nicholas May
Creative Linking Team
Real Estate Webmasters