A Competitor Copied a Page on My Site: What Can I Do?

When you’re trying to build a blog, you start seeking out unique topics you can cover. You’re searching for topics that are relevant to your business but that haven’t really been covered before; these content gaps give you a foot in the door in your industry and a chance to rank highly for subjects your customers might be interested in.

The trouble is, it feels like every single topic under the sun has been covered at some point or another. How can you start to rank if everything you would want to cover has already been covered?

The usual answer is encompassed in the famous quote, “Anything you can do, I can do better.” Instead of worrying about what hasn’t been covered, worry about what’s relevant to your customers and find ways to cover those topics better than your competition.

Of course, other people are doing the same thing, and they may be looking at you to outdo you. It’s an arms race, and it’s one where there can never be a true, permanent winner.

In the course of your research, while you scope out your competitors, maybe you see something a little distressing. You see some content that looks pretty familiar. Almost too familiar. In fact, it looks a whole lot like your content. What can you do?

Let’s talk about it.

Copying Versus Inspiration

The first thing you need to do is determine whether or not the competitor in question is directly copying you or if they’re just inspired by what you’ve created. And yes, I know; it can feel a lot like someone is copying you if they’re inspired by you and covering all of the same points, but there’s an important distinction.

There are effectively three “tiers” of mimicry that are worth discussing, with some variations within each tier.

Tier 1: Direct Copying

The first tier is direct copying. This is when another website takes your content in whole (or in part) and just copies the entire thing. It is word-for-word the same content you wrote.

This is the kind of copying that you can find using tools like Copyscape or Text Compare. Since these apps check for duplicates of the content you feed into them, they can show you when someone else has copied the same thing you wrote. And, of course, you can just use your eyes; if you have a piece of content and someone else has a page with the same words in the same order, it’s pretty obvious.

There are variations to this. Most of the time, if a spam site is going to be stealing your content – and it is stealing, the formal name would be intellectual property theft – they’re usually going to do things like change the URLs so they don’t point to your domain, and add more ads to the page so they can make money from it in the short time their page is allowed to exist before it’s removed.

They may also change some keywords up to vary what the page actually ranks for, particularly in the case of locally-focused keywords.

It’s worth paying attention to the fact that quotations and references, specific data, and even common phrases and formats will often trigger these kinds of checks and tools, but are obviously fine. If someone is quoting your post and citing you, you aren’t going to want to take it down, and it’s not theft anyway, as long as it’s a smaller part of an overall whole.

There are a few cases where direct copying is okay. I’ve seen the occasional business owner get very concerned over these without realizing they’re created by their own team.

Content syndication. Yahoo News, for example, posts a lot of content on its own domain, but that content comes from other sites; for example, this post on Yahoo News is just this post from The Herald and can also be found on The Charlotte Observer. All of them are identical and attributed to the same author.

Syndication is perfectly fine, but for proper SEO, it needs something called a canonical link. Indeed, if you view the page source for the Yahoo page, it has a rel=canonical link to the Herald post, and the Herald post has a rel=canonical link to the Charlotte Observer, which has its own rel=canonical link to itself. That all means the Charlotte Observer is the original source of the content. The others can all rank in search, but Google knows that it’s not stolen content but intentionally syndicated content.

Owned media. Another instance where direct duplication is okay is when the other domain posting your content is also a domain you control. For example, if I took this same post and posted it on my other blog, it’s perfectly acceptable. I wouldn’t want to because it takes away from this one, but I could. More typically, though, sites will use secondary platforms like Substack and Medium to post their own content as a way to give it a second life once its initial burst of traffic has tapered off. That doesn’t mean Medium stole your content; it means you posted it there.

The caveat to both of these is when you didn’t post the content in these places or give permission for syndication. These are only allowed if you’ve given permission to do so and they’re properly attributed.

Tier 2: Spinning

The second tier is article spinning. Article spinning is when someone takes the post you created, changes out words for words that mean the same thing, and publishes it as their own.

So, I might write something like:

“Owned media. Another instance where direct duplication is okay is when the other domain posting your content is also a domain you control. For example, if I took this same post and posted it on my other blog, it’s perfectly acceptable. I wouldn’t want to, because it takes away from this one, but I could. More typically, though, sites will use secondary platforms like Substack and Medium to post their own content, as a way to give it a second life once its initial burst of traffic has tapered off. That doesn’t mean Medium stole your content, it means you posted it there.”

And a spun version might be:

“Possessed media. Another happening where direct copying is okay is when the other site publishing your media is also a site you guide. For instance, if I took this same content and published it on my other site, it’s entirely reasonable. I wouldn’t want to, because it removes from this one, but I could. More usually, though, blogs will use tertiary platforms like Medium and Substack to publish their own media, as a method to allow it a second life once its first explosion of congestion has dropped away. That doesn’t mean Substack thieved your media, it means you published it there.”

As you can see, this isn’t as good. It uses some incorrect wording with words that are synonyms in different contexts, it doesn’t flow as well, and it’s not as intelligible. But it exists, it has keywords in it, and you might not notice it’s a direct copy at a glance. Certainly, if you try to do a search in quotes for a sentence from the original, it won’t bring up the spun version.

Google, of course, has a huge library of semantic indexation that can tell immediately that these two passages are identical. It can also tell, largely based on which was published first, which one was the original. That’s a big part of why spinning doesn’t work anymore.

Tier 3: Rewriting and Inspiration

The third tier is the hardest to detect and the least likely to be considered theft. It’s when the content you publish is used as inspiration, but the content the competitor publishes is, in most ways, unique. Maybe it covers the same topic with the same basic points in more or less the same order, but all of the actual content is unique.

This happened a lot back when Panda rolled out in 2011, and millions of websites had to scramble to make their content unique. You’d see thousands of jobs on content mills of just “rewrite this content so it passes Copyscape.”

These days, you can just ask ChatGPT to do that for you, and it works fine. It’s arguably immoral but not technically theft. It’s annoying to see it happen, but there’s nothing you can really do about it.

This is also how legitimate content is made, of course. A lot of the content I write is inspired by other sites. I don’t ever “copy” one site as a whole, though; I’ll read numerous posts on a topic, think about ways to expand the topic, read posts on the expanded sub-topics, synthesize the information, and produce my own content.

What to Do When You Spot a Copycat

If you spot tier one or tier two copies out there on the market, obviously, you’ll want to do something. These other sites shouldn’t be allowed to get away with stealing your work and profiting off it! As long as it’s not syndicated legally or owned media, you can take some actions. The question is, what?

Start by documenting everything. Take screenshots of the copied content with dates and file it all away. This is proof in case the situation escalates, and you need some way to prove the theft happened.

Contact the site owner. In some cases, the owner of the site copying your content might not be aware that it happened, such as if they hired a cheap “content production” company that just steals/spins content. The site owner might remove the content and possibly fire their marketing firm. You’ll definitely need proof, though, and if you can’t easily find a way to contact the site owner, it could be an indication that the theft is intentional.

Contact the site’s web host. Most web hosts have contract clauses that stipulate the sites they host shouldn’t be used for illegal activity, and intellectual property theft is illegal. Again, you’ll want to provide proof. Most web hosts have a “report abuse” or other form you can fill out or an email you can send your evidence to. Some web hosts don’t, though, especially those hosted outside of the country, so this is hit or miss as well.

Report the page to Google. Google offers a way to remove results from search if they’re illegal, and infringing on your intellectual property rights is illegal. This page has more information. You’re essentially filing an official DMCA request to have the stolen content removed. Note that this doesn’t remove the content from the web; it just removes it from Google’s search results. That’s functionally good enough, but it doesn’t actually stop the theft, so you may need to pursue other options as well.

What About Legal Action?

Can you sue a website for stealing your content?

Technically, yes. The truth is, though, 99.99% of the time, it isn’t worth it. The sites that resist all of the methods above are going to be very difficult to sue. You’ll often need to initiate legal proceedings and get a subpoena to send to the web host to get contact information and identity information for the site owner, which may not even be real or valid, and then sue them, which is a long, tedious, and expensive process.

Generally, true legal action is only worthwhile in cases where you’re tangibly being damaged by the copied content. Most of the time, direct copies are easy for Google to detect and deprioritize, and you aren’t really losing much out of them. It’s unfortunate, but that’s how it goes.

At the very least, you can have a lawyer draft an official Cease & Desist letter to send, which is often enough to get the ball rolling, at least.

Finding Your Own Inspiration

To wrap things back to our discussion at the start, that third tier of “copying” is drawing inspiration from those around you. As long as you aren’t directly copying and stealing content from other sites, there aren’t really any roadblocks to producing your own content on the same topics. My perennial recommendation is to read many different sources and build your understanding of a topic so you can cover it in your own words, with your own perspectives, structure, and format.

Topicfinder is one tool that can help you with that. With Topicfinder, you can put in a website, a topic, or another starting point and get a deep-dive listing of the kinds of titles and topics other people are using to cover that topic. It can’t be used for theft because it’s just giving you titles and title ideas, and you have to build your own content from there. That is how you take inspiration rather than take content. Give it a try and see what I mean!

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