Stolen Content Update

[mgwhitemti]

Thanks so much for implementing this. When we receive Google Alerts related to this, should we send them to support?

I've gotten two alerts that say "Google Web Alert for: This article is property of Constant Content Writer Mary White and is being printed here without the author's permission." ... but when I've clicked through the links in the alerts, I haven't seen anything that looks like my content.

Thanks

Mary

[Celeste Stewart]

Mary,
Try googling a few paragraphs of your text or the phrase and look at the description in the Google results. Does your text appear there? I've heard of people copying and pasting articles into the "meta descriptions" which attract search engines. They don't actually use the text to display to readers, but to attract hits. Still NOT right. If they use our words in any manner, they should pay. I'm betting this is what happened to you. They may even be displaying the text using invisible text (like white text on a white background) on their site to attract the search engines as well. Try going to the site and copying everything on their page. Paste it into Word and then change the text color to blue or black. You may find your article that way, too. Just a couple theories. . .

[mgwhitemti]

Celeste - Thanks for the ideas ... no luck, though ... this time. Both of the sites that I received alerts for are the type that have content that is updated frequently, like blogs that rotate text off as new text comes on. That may be why.

Is anyone else getting hits on their Google Alerts?

Mary

[jrichards]

Hi Mary,

Is the Google Alert test in quotation marks? For the alerts to work properly they should be set up to search for
"This article is property of Constant Content Writer Mary White and is being printed here without the author's permission."

As opposed to
This article is property of Constant Content Writer Mary White and is being printed here without the author's permission.

With the quotation marks the search will look for exact matches to the sentence, without the quotation marks it will look for all the words.

If your alert is in quotation marks, could you send a note to support with the names of the articles and the names of the websites where the article was found? That way we can do some investigations.

Thanks,
-jrichards

[bwhite]

I set mine up a couple of weeks ago and, just like the rest of you, am hoping to NOT get any alerts. I'll google some of the text from my pieces just to be sure that nobody has gotten any of my work 'illegally'.
Thanks for all the work CC does to help us earn an honest buck or two and to keep it safe!

[mgwhitemti]

Jrichards - Thanks for the quotation mark tip. I don't think I set it up that way. I'll fix it.

Thank you!

Mary