Pandia cloned by copyright thief

Thief copies the content of Pandia over to new site.

(April 25 2004) This morning we received a mail from a friendly pay-per-click search engine warning us about a website more or less identical to Pandia's own.

The owner of the cloned site had signed up to a large number of pay-per-click search engines, and was clearly trying to generate paid search traffic through this "new" search oriented site. He or she had also included Google Adwords text ads.

He or she had copied nearly all of our pages and files, including the Pandia logos and names, and -- would you believe it -- our own copyright notice.

Now, what's the point in doing this? Well, the search engines are rewarding content, and this person (or persons) clearly hoped that the content rich and search engine relevant pages of Pandia would attract searchers.

Given the lack of relevant inbound links the site had not gained any impressive ranking in any of the major search engines , but the owner clearly hoped that that could be fixed in time.

Ultimately the search engines would have found out by comparing the pages of Pandia and this cloned site. Google and Yahoo! could then have banned both sites, believing that we at Pandia were trying to build artificial gateway pages in order to lead more visitors to ads and affiliate programs.

Hence, if someone is stealing your content, you not only risk losing well deserved traffic, you may also loose your search engine listings.

This kind of copyright infringements happens all the time on the Web, powered by unscrupulous people looking for a quick buck.

We immediately sent a mail to the company hosting the site, and asked them to close it. No more than three hours later the account was suspended.

However, there is more you can do if your site is copied. We also emailed all the pay-per-click search engines included on the front page of this "new" Pandia Search Central.

The cloner had also hijacked the ad for the Planet Ocean search engine marketing tutorial on the front page, replacing our link with their own affiliate code. We sent a similar mail to Planet Ocean and to the Google Adwords program.

The next phase would have been to send Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves a copyright infringement notifications documenting the theft.

This complaint would be sent by snail mail with copies of at least some of the offending pages and information regarding the site owner. By using a whois lookup you can find who owns the new domain.

If this had not worked, we would have taken further legal action.

The lesson from this case is that web site owner should look out for possible copyright infringements. You can, for instance, at regular intervals search the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves for a text string that is unique for your site.

Enclose the text string in quotation marks. Any identical sites that have been spidered by the search engines will normally be listed in the search engine results.

If any of our readers find other copies of Pandia, please let us know.

The "alternative" Pandia site, with Google Adwords on the home page.

DISCLAIMER: We are not lawyers, and this article is not meant as legal advice. If you find that your site has been copied, you should seek professional legal advice.

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