This post is going to be quick and dirty, in regular me fashion. Recently I was playing around in my Google Search Console and came across a couple backlinks that were curious to me.
I was like, huh, why is this website linking to my contact and my speaker engagement page? When I did more digging, I realized the website in question, “mission4media.com”, copied and pasted my entire blog post to their site. Legit, word for word.
To be clear: I did not give permission for this person/company (or anyone) to copy and paste any article/blog/page on my website. I did not give permission for them to repost it on their blog and listing themselves as the author.
Not only did they steal my blog post but they also left in my CTA in the last paragraph to “Contact me”. So imagine you’re on a website reading a seriously amazing blog post (haha) and then at the bottom you click to contact the Blog Author, who in this case is posing as “James Furman”. BUT because they left my link the exact same as it is on my website, the Contact Me CTA actually leads users to my website, if you clicked that link on that shitty website, you’d be confused af.
Seriously, if you’re going to steal content, try and be smart about it, dingus. Share on XWhy is duplicate content on the internet an issue?
Duplicate content can hurt your search engine rankings. Why? Because the search engine (and I’m talking about Google, because who uses Bing or Yahoo?) doesn’t know which URL to include or exclude from its indices. This means, Google will look at both pages and be like “WTF?!”. So ensuring there’s no duplicate content from your site on another’s is definitely something to be aware of.
Contacting the Website Owner
Pro tip #1: If your social media account is suspended, remove the link on your website. The footer of the stupid website has a link to Twitter, but it goes to a page that says “This account is suspended”. Funny, how does that even happen? Apparently they’re a social media marketing company, if they were an actual social media marketing company, they wouldn’t of gotten their Twitter suspended…
Angrily, like super late at night, I went to Twitter to voice my concerns after finding James Furman’s personal account.
WTF! Some fucking “Social Media Company” stole my blog posts and posted them as their own!? pic.twitter.com/E7dH8dMOwP
— Beverley Theresa ? (@hellobeverley) July 8, 2017
Hey, @AQWELAAPPAREL, how about you remove my blog posts that you copied and pasted and claimed as Mission 4 Media’s!?
— Beverley Theresa ? (@hellobeverley) July 8, 2017
You would know about flattering people because you legit steal their content. @AQWELAAPPAREL https://t.co/jK2l5b3kR4
— Beverley Theresa ? (@hellobeverley) July 8, 2017
With no response from James on Twitter, even though his account IS active, I sent him a form message via his website and I proceeded to call him. I had to call him FIVE times until he actually took my call. Finally he said he would look into it and take it down. That was yesterday, and my post is still up. Seriously, if someone told me to remove something of their’s I’d do it ASAP… Don’t make me phone rape you, James!
How and Why to Disavow Links
So um, I’m friends with Melanie Nathan, who’s kind of a big deal. Just saying, she’s one of the original linkbuilders and overall a badass bitch. This is what she told me to do about the duplicate content link:
The dude wins at failing spectacularly. You might want to disavow that link.
— Melanie Nathan (ツ) (@melanienathan) July 8, 2017
I had never heard of that term, “disavow a link”, but I quickly Googled wtf it was and then was like “Yeah! I totally should!” and pretended like I knew what she was talking about (shhhh!). It’s actually quite easy if you follow Google’s instructions step by step. Basically, if you have links from shitty, spammy, low quality websites (ahem!) it hurts your PageRank, so you need to tell Google to not care about those links.
I submitted the .txt file and was like “Hey, Melanie, I disavow’d those links like you said.” and pretended I knew how to all along even though I had to Google it. I think she was proud of my elite interneting skills.
The Obvious Learning
Check your backlinks on a regular basis, not only is it neat to see who’s linking to your site, but also to catch crummy buttfaces who steal your content.
PS I’m pretty sure almost 99.9% of the content on that website is stolen (I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one of my blog posts is on there). If you’re a blogger you might want to take a look for yourselves.
