Someone Stole My Website
October 27, 2007
I was browsing the stats of my websites yesterday and I noticed an odd number of referrals on one site from a domain name similar to mine. I did some investigating and low and behold someone actually stole all of the content from my site! Everything is a perfect match from content to pictures. Unbelievable!
Obviously I was mad and started to consider ways to get this 
person back, but then I thought more about it. First of all, the site in question makes less than $100 a month. Secondly, since I have already done some link building and promotion, the search engines have likely credited my site as the original source for the content. Lastly, I figure if this guy is that shady, then he is probably not someone I want to interact with on any level. All these reasons plus the fact that I am aiming for bigger things has kept me from pursuing any action.
Some may question my passive approach to this incident, but here are some things to remember about the future success of my site over the stolen one…
-My article marketing efforts all link back to my site.
-All of my original content is immediately linked on social sites, giving me the credit.
-My site will grow; the stolen website will remain static.
-I recently added an email opt-in, whose registrants will always be mine.
-I will likely rank higher in the serps for every key term.
-Again…the site is only making a small pittance. Not enough to worry about.
Of course I could consider this to be a compliment to my website abilities, but I tend to think I am simply an easy target. The site was designed with an HTML editor, so it is probably easy to copy with just the source code. I did notice that the thief added a couple of different products to the mix, which gave me some ideas on how I might monetize things better. With that thought in mind, I am going to monitor his site. Maybe I can learn a trick or two to help me optimize my site better from a sales perspective. I suppose it would be pretty ironic if the thief indirectly helped me earn more money!
