Is Someone Sabotaging your Blog?
Find out how to find out if your content is being copied to other sites and report plagiarism to Google’s legal team
Topics: Google Security. Cybersecurity.
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While researching plagiarism I found the same sites that are copying my content copying content from others like Dark Reading, Medium’s whole site, and IDG to name a few. I’m going to explain how to find the offenders copying your sites in this blog and how to report it.
I have recently been finding copies of my work blatantly reproduced on other web sites which I wrote about in these two blogs:
If you want to find out if one of the above sites is copying your own content specifically, you can start with a general search for copyrighted content from medium in Google like this:
medium site:levitrares.comRight away you can see the levitrares [.] com is copying the entire medium site. Whatever they are doing by copying content this way seems to be harming Google search engine rankings, not to mention they are illegally copying copyrighted material, presuming Medium is not copying and reposting their own site.
If you continue own the list and onto the second page you can see that this site is basically copying a lot of people’s blogs:
If you have something unique on your blog posts you can add it to the query to try to narrow down and find your stolen content. My last name is pretty unique so I can search on:
radichel medium site:levitrares.comI can see the this site is copying the main link to my blog below:
Click on the three dots next to the URL and you get a popup like this so you don’t have to visit the page. Copy the URL.
Now report that URL to Google’s legal team using this link along with a link to your actual blog with a copyright at the bottom.
Read the fine print.
Another way to search for plagiarism
If you want to find out if your blogs are on sites other than levitrares you can search for something like this where a dash indicates you want to exclude medium. Choose other keywords that uniquely identify your blog.
radichel medium cloud security -site:medium.comIn this search I noticed that my blog was listed as one of the best security blogs to follow. That’s pretty cool:
Interestingly, Medium would not let me publish this blog with a link to that site. I am not sure why and maybe you shouldn’t visit it but if you want to use this search in Google:
100 Best Cyber Security Blogs and Websites site:feedspot.comHowever right after that I found another URL sabotaging my site which I will report. I’ve written about this site before:
When I looked at the page it was pretty much a word for word copy of my blog post.
Here are two more that look possibly suspicious (they may be ok). I happen to know that some malicious content comes out of Malaysia so I will avoid clicking that link and generally others if I can use an alternate way to confirm stolen content. Perhaps the wayback machine or I can open them in a cloud VM.
I guess I’m on a who’s who list. Seems cool but I didn’t click the link.
Found my book for sale on a site in the Netherlands. Cool. I hope that it’s a legitimate site.
Searching on a particular site name I see that pages are still in the index that I already reported. Have to see what I can do about that. Luckily I was able to contact someone at the organization that did remove the pages. They said the problem was with my RSS feed. No, it’s not. First of all, I don’t control the Medium RSS feed. Secondly, you need to ensure that if you use an RSS feed that you are not blatantly copying content — like reposting the title of the other site word for word as the title of your own page.
I stopped at about page 5 and that’s pretty much all I saw. I’ve already reported about 10 URLs and Google promptly removed most of them.
I started to monitor this traffic daily and even after reporting many URLs from offending sites, they continue the same activity of copying and reposting sites. Here’s an example I found today. They are basically stripping out the images and reposting all the words. Exactly.
Their page:
Original:
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It seems like after reporting the same site repeatedly Google could take additional action to remove the site from their search index. It is very easy for offenders to continue to do this and time consuming for those reporting it.
The most frustrating thing is that although Google took down some of the individual posts, they have yet to remove the page where the site is copying the main page of my blogs. Because that content changes daily I’m not sure if they are having a hard time figuring out that the site is blatantly copying it and they are not letting me resubmit the URL because it has already been submitted. I hope they figure that one out and remove it soon.
Some other people have reported other links in the response to the comment on this page that may also be applicable for reporting sites manipulating Google search engine rankings:
Good luck hunting your own stolen content and getting it taken down. I really hope this helps others find and report plagiarism.
Update 4/28/23 — happening again by a site called cyberiqs. Report submitted.
Follow for updates.
Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2022
About Teri Radichel:
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