Can the DMCA and "Black Hat" SEO ban you from Yahoo?
Apparently yes....
Usually when you find a "dumb as a stump" site owner that swipes your copyrighted web copy and tries to use it on their site, a strongly worded email with the threat of DMCA *Digital Millennium Copyright Act* gets the creep in line pretty quickly. I guess it's like shouting, "Attorney General" to a sleazy business owner, only the hardcore crooks blow you off.
Our main website, devNIC, has moved closer to becoming the small business resource portal we envisioned, but the content, subjects as diverse as expired domain names to commodity margins, mortgage affordability, refinance costs and even lead generation have become ripe for web copy pirates.
The net thieves have found a way to swipe your web copy, claim it as their own and then get Yahoo to get you booted because they said it was their copyrighted material and not yours. Sounds crazy right? Evidently, it’s happening right now and what’s worse is the fact the Yahoo, initially, has defended its policy.
It’s a shoot first and ask questions later mentality on Yahoo’s part. The web copy thieves are licking their chops. Not only do they get a ranking piece of web copy on their site for squat, they also get you removed from the search engine. It’s like an online Coup d’etat.
All the other major search engines like Google and MSN actively protect copyrighted material, but they don’t ban you before a little informal fact finding. The Yahoo policy seems extreme if not down right scary.
If you’re not actively policing where your web copy resides offsite, then make it part of your site maintenance. As a matter of fact, this should become part of your search engine reputation management.
The easiest way to do this is do a search in Google and Yahoo with a string of text that’s unique to your content. Use “” quotes around the search term. The idea here is to spot your content without the clutter of thousands of websites using the same text. Remember to grab a cached copy of your web page too.
These people are so lazy; they rarely even change more than a few words of text from the original article or tutorial. I recently had a guy swipe a 1200 word domain name tutorial. The nitwit changed a total of 3 words of text.
A strongly worded email to the webmaster of the site will usually get results pretty quickly. Don’t shy away from threatening to contact their web hosting provider if they give you a hard time or just plain ignore you.
Notice how we didn’t say to contact Yahoo…yet. Try to deal with the site owner initially. If you’re unable to get any resolution or response, then by all means, contact Yahoo and any other search engine that has “your” copyrighted content indexed in their search results.
By: Rick Contrata