What is Content Scraping?
Content scraping, or web scraping, is the process of pulling original content from other websites and publishing it in a different location.
What can I do about it?
There are a couple of options that we recommend if it has come to your attention that your website content is being used elsewhere.
Option 1 - Contact the site owner
You can contact the owner of the website that is using your content and ask them to remove the content from their site.
You can enter the URL into this website to see if it provides contact information for the owner of the URL. Usually, this information is marked "private". You can try the contact form on the site that has taken your content but this site is doing this as a way to get traffic and probably will not respond to you.
Option 2 -File a complaint with Google
If you are unable to successfully contact the site owner you can file a Digital Millennium Copywrite Act complaint with Google.
If you are unable to successfully contact the site owner you can file a Digital Millennium Copywrite Act complaint with Google.
While Google can not "take down" the page (only the site owner can do that) they can remove it from indexing, which then will not hurt your rankings at all, and will prevent anyone from ever finding the page (live or not).
We recommend only taking this step if the content that is duplicated has a high ranking on Google or they may just ignore it (getting into the top 3 pages on search). Here is where you would submit that complaint: https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en
We also recommend...
Creating a Copyright page on your website
We suggest that you create a clear copyright page that can be linked to the footer of your site. Here is a site that can help you create the text for these pages; https://www.privacypolicies.com/
A copyright is a written notice detailing that states that your work is copyrighted and that the rights to the use of your work belong to you.