What do you do when someone steals your blog article?

[Andrew Michaels]

I just posted my new article today: Finding And Setting Goals

And my site just told me that someone just stole it because my blog detected a link in the article to another one of my articles.

What do you do in a case like this? Has this happened to Steve or anyone else with a popular blog?

Thanks.

[InJoy]

I've had this happen to me as well. I don't know if there is any recourse. One thing I did do was change the names of my graphics and links so that theirs would no longer work.

From what I can tell, these posts are taken solely to make a fake blog appear real and active to search engines and to draw people in to click on links. In my case, after the first article was taken, no others were after that.

[Jenny]

At the very least could you leave a comment with a link back to your site? You could word it in witty fashion leaving no doubt about who wrote the post and maybe mention if people want to "borrow" your stuff in the future they give you credit.

I'm shocked that anyone would do that, nice post though!

[Andrew Michaels]

The comment thing is apparently inoperative, as it brings you to a word press log on when you click on it, though I have to admit that a witty comment might have been entertaining, if not effective in correcting anything.

[Caveman Joe]

Well, they have an AdSense account, so report them to Google. If your site featured any images, I'd recommend the traditional approach: replace them with ******************.

[Caveman Joe]

What the hell, that's a censored word?! Since when did that word become a profanity?

[jpfieber]

Here's what I did:

Hurry and see what happens to hotlinking content stealers!

[InJoy]

I'm glad your methods worked! Thanks for the code reference. Nice!

[Jenny]

Sweet! I am very impressed with your solution! It must of felt great to see your posts removed.

[Ellesse]

Interesting. I just had one of my articles stolen and then I saw this post. What I did was dropped the person a comment to have the article taken off or I would pursue it. He was using a blog off some blog service, so I complained to the blog service's legal department for them to do penalize the blog, since the article is still on the site.

Am keeping my fingers crossed though.

[jamestl2]

First, to find out who stole it, I use Copyscape.

Then I would ask that site owner to remove the content, although I haven't had to worry about this because I haven't encountered any of my web pages copied.

[Iksander]

Don't forget about 'whois'. While you can pay for your information to not be released public, few people actually select that option (different story for people that sign up with a service, instead of their own domain).

Google whois and you should get some ideas - a whole lot of info on people with whois.