Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~
Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:09 pm
Hi JC, I signed up just to give you my support in this matter. As a webmaster I know it sucks when someone else blatantly copies your content, no credit given. I'm sure you know but in case you don't... there are steps you actually need to take now that you have uncovered what is essentially stolen content(copy pasta verbatim, more than a snippet's worth).
Step #1 - Send stratics a cease and desist letter with examples of copied content and explain that you do not approve. The best strategy is always to work it out directly with the offender.
Step #2 - If/when they ignore you or refuse it's time to send their host an official letter explaining the same and ask that their host do something about the situation
Step #3 - If/when that fails to produce satisfactory results for you it's time to begin filing individual DMCA notices on a per page basis, and it sounds like you might have to make hundreds of them. You will need to provide a link to the page that was copied(more than a snippet's worth, Google will not remove pages from their index if there is only a sentence of two copied. Why not? Because Google copies a snippet from every page online too, lol)
Tips: begin randomly copying page titles and see if Stratics returns the same page titles, if they do and the content is the same file a DMCA on that page. Randomly select sentences or paragraphs from within your own pages and run the checks again, sometimes the titles are different. When you file a DMCA you want to do so for every page you find, one by one, and link the copied page and the offending page along with a good paragraph or two of copied text.
At the very least you will be removing Stratics pages from the search index. DO NOT go looking around on stratics to find copied content for the purpose of DMCA notices. There is a chance Google has already ignored the stratics version because they found it to be duplicate. Trust me you WANT stratics to have loads of duplicate content pages that don't rank so that they sink in the rankings SITEWIDE. Even their non-copied pages will fall in ranking if too many pages are duplicate. Also, you need to repeat the process for Bing, but Google first.
Lastly, for future reference, there is code you can add to UOGuide that will make it harder to copy content. It disables to copy and view source functions so that they simply don't work. It's still possible to get the source code but it's more difficult and time consuming. Why make it easy?
ok, REALLY lastly... if Stratics won't fess up and do the right thing then create a page explaining the situation(like this one) and add a NOINDEX meta header tag to it so that it does not get indexed in search(don't need nofollow on links on the page, just the meta tag). Then add some code to your .htaccess that will check the referrer of incoming visitors to see if they have a stratics referrer and if they do they get redirected to your explanation page. You want to do this because if your DMCA's start taking effect and Stratics does fall in rank a bit then the incoming links from stratics are worth a bit less and may even become poisonous to uoguide(low quality). If they all point to a noindex page they are not considered in search. Make sure the redirect employs a 301 redirect, not the default 302, so that Google knows the change is permanent.
There's more you can do, if you want any help with any of the above send me a message. I really hope Stratics gets their head out of their arses on this one, content theft makes them look bad.
Good luck JC.
*edit* remember to put quotation marks around any text you're searching for in Google so that you get exact matches. I randomly did a search for "The New Player House is built by Mim Foxglove to provide inspiration and encouragement for the young ones" with quotation marks and found that you are long overdue for DMCA requests, there has to be 50 sites all copying the same words verbatim. Good news - you do rank ahead of the copies, but you want to keep it that way.
Step #1 - Send stratics a cease and desist letter with examples of copied content and explain that you do not approve. The best strategy is always to work it out directly with the offender.
Step #2 - If/when they ignore you or refuse it's time to send their host an official letter explaining the same and ask that their host do something about the situation
Step #3 - If/when that fails to produce satisfactory results for you it's time to begin filing individual DMCA notices on a per page basis, and it sounds like you might have to make hundreds of them. You will need to provide a link to the page that was copied(more than a snippet's worth, Google will not remove pages from their index if there is only a sentence of two copied. Why not? Because Google copies a snippet from every page online too, lol)
Tips: begin randomly copying page titles and see if Stratics returns the same page titles, if they do and the content is the same file a DMCA on that page. Randomly select sentences or paragraphs from within your own pages and run the checks again, sometimes the titles are different. When you file a DMCA you want to do so for every page you find, one by one, and link the copied page and the offending page along with a good paragraph or two of copied text.
At the very least you will be removing Stratics pages from the search index. DO NOT go looking around on stratics to find copied content for the purpose of DMCA notices. There is a chance Google has already ignored the stratics version because they found it to be duplicate. Trust me you WANT stratics to have loads of duplicate content pages that don't rank so that they sink in the rankings SITEWIDE. Even their non-copied pages will fall in ranking if too many pages are duplicate. Also, you need to repeat the process for Bing, but Google first.
Lastly, for future reference, there is code you can add to UOGuide that will make it harder to copy content. It disables to copy and view source functions so that they simply don't work. It's still possible to get the source code but it's more difficult and time consuming. Why make it easy?
ok, REALLY lastly... if Stratics won't fess up and do the right thing then create a page explaining the situation(like this one) and add a NOINDEX meta header tag to it so that it does not get indexed in search(don't need nofollow on links on the page, just the meta tag). Then add some code to your .htaccess that will check the referrer of incoming visitors to see if they have a stratics referrer and if they do they get redirected to your explanation page. You want to do this because if your DMCA's start taking effect and Stratics does fall in rank a bit then the incoming links from stratics are worth a bit less and may even become poisonous to uoguide(low quality). If they all point to a noindex page they are not considered in search. Make sure the redirect employs a 301 redirect, not the default 302, so that Google knows the change is permanent.
There's more you can do, if you want any help with any of the above send me a message. I really hope Stratics gets their head out of their arses on this one, content theft makes them look bad.
Good luck JC.
*edit* remember to put quotation marks around any text you're searching for in Google so that you get exact matches. I randomly did a search for "The New Player House is built by Mim Foxglove to provide inspiration and encouragement for the young ones" with quotation marks and found that you are long overdue for DMCA requests, there has to be 50 sites all copying the same words verbatim. Good news - you do rank ahead of the copies, but you want to keep it that way.