What should you do if your senior living content is scraped?
This week’s question from a reader is a good one. It’s a practice we used to see a lot of…scraping the content word for word (or almost word for word) off someone else’s site.
In the pre-Panda update days of Google, it was a constant battle.
Then Panda, Penguin and a variety of Google updates with cute animal names came along and it became obvious that scraping content didn’t get you very far.
But lately we’ve been seeing content we’ve created for one client appear on other sites. Primarily on senior care tech related sites and start ups. And we’ve even found it on smaller home care agency sites.
There might be instances when the organization didn’t realize what they were doing was wrong. When I say this, I’m referring mostly to the mom and pop home care agencies.
Others absolutely do know what they are doing. They are Googling a topic and determining who ranks highest in the search engine results for it. Then they hop on over and grab that content.
So what should you do if you discover your senior living content has been poached? Here’s some advice.
- Contact the web master or marketing director or whomever you can find on the site. Ask them to take the content down and give them a very short deadline to comply with your request.
- If the deadline passes, and you are feeling generous, try again. Or try contacting a different person. Perhaps a compliance officer or legal team member listed on the site.
- You can also send a Cease and Desist order by registered mail to the company’s physical address. Again, give them a tight deadline to comply and suggest you will take legal action. (We know it can be tricky with some of these tech companies that are oozing in to the senior living space as they work hard to hide their physical address.)
- You can also contact the host company the offender uses. Send them what is called a DMCA notice. Most reputable hosting companies will investigate and take the content down. You might run in to trouble if the offender claims they wrote the content. But if you can show dates/locations where you published it first, the host will likely take the content in question down.
- Another avenue is to file a complaint with Google directly. You might get lucky and they will remove the content from their index so the offender isn’t able to gain traffic from your hard work.
- Finally, you can take legal action. It can be a lengthy and expensive process though so be prepared.
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