Dirty Internet thieves

I'm having a ready-to-throw-in-the-towel morning at NewYorkology again. I'm a content person. And I don't cheat, "borrow" or steal online. And for those reasons (and yes, many others,)I will always be out-moused as long as I remain independent.

So without getting too deep into the big picture, here's the most mind-boggling case this morning. I was looking for some content in my archives, using the Google search engine. On some search terms, my stuff doesn't show up on the front page of results, but instead I see my content on other sites that have scraped NewYorkology's content in part -- or in whole.

So, have a look at the current NewYorkology front page. And then have a look at these screen grabs of part of their page (as I'm not going to link to the offending site.)






There is seriously NO content on that page that isn't mine, besides the Google ads, banner at the top and a Weather Channel box. They're even feeding in my jump pages as part of their front page, I assume to get even more keywords in one place.

No contact info of course, so I sent e-mail to their proxy through WhoIs. The next step is to contact Google, which you can no longer do by e-mail. So I'll write up a complaint to them with all the documentation, in hopes that sometime down the line they'll prohibit that site from selling Google Ads, and thus force them to find another way to monetize my stolen content.

And no, I'm not looking for solutions to try this or that, or contact a lawyer or get my IT guys to do XYZ. I'm just venting. The offenders are probably in Moscow or Nigeria. And it's a total whack-a-mole game as there's always going to be 10 more tomorrow. I've mostly given up chasing these types of guys down, but this (and another this morning,) is outranking me in Google with my own content.

Earlier: Will aggregators kill the news?
Bruni dines on Eater, leaves without paying
Calling out thieving BuddyTV
'Courtesy of' my cold thieving hands
Bad attribution, British style
More NYT attribution - on a military law blog
On attribution, linking and fairness

Update: At least one reader on Twitter was confused, so maybe I should clarify. Amy's New York Notebook (the site you're reading now) is the personal website of Amy Langfield, who is the editor of NewYorkology.com. NewYorkology's content was ripped off by a completely different website (shown above) but they're not named or linked to here because that would only improve their search engine rankings further. This by the way, is the current top of the NewYorkology website for comparison:



Update II: As of Tuesday morning, NewYorkology's stuff is gone from the front page of the offending site, though the cache files show he copied HUGE portions of the site. The front page now looks like this:

Labels: media

- posted by Amy @ 5/24/2009 10:12:00 AM