Realty Times October 13, 2004

How To Find Pirates Who Steal From Your Website
by Bill Koelzer

If you have a truly great Website, or even if you have just a couple of superb pieces of original art, or several ultra-clever lines of text, you can bet that some agent somewhere has stolen some of it.

Lucky for you, tools exist to help you find out who has taken text or art from you. In addition, below are sites with valuable information that you should read before going after pirates.

Tools to Help You Locate Pirates:

  • CopyScape.com helps you find sites that contain material identical to that on your own site. It is a good place to begin hunting for pirates.

  • The Wayback Machine can show you archived copies of how Websites looked many years ago. The Wayback Machine is an excellent way to prove that your copyrighted material existed long before the pirate posted it on his/her Website.

    For example, here is the Website of pioneer Phoenix RealtorŪ, Alice Held:

    Today

    May 16, 2001

    May 16, 1998

    Dec 17, 1996

  • The Similar Page Checker allows you to compare the content of your site with that of any other site which is useful in proving that someone has duplicated your material, especially when they literally copy entire pages, or, your entire site. If their site comes up ranking more than a few percentage points similar to yours, you should carefully inspect their site. Note, on some template sites, naturally there will be duplication. However, as you use the Similar Page Checker you also learn to identify false positives.

    If you compare Drew and Linda Hartanov's Orange County site with that of Fran and Rowena, near Pasadena, using The Similar Page Checker, you get the following result:

    http://www.hartanovteam.com is 7.9472329472329 percentage similar to http://www.lacanadarealestate.com.

    Since both are template sites from Advanced Access sites, you would expect that more of the content would be the same. However, both of these sites have been terrifically modified. Each is now packed with brilliantly conceived original content created mostly from scratch by their owners for their own regions. As a result, the percentage of similar content is amazingly low.

  • Another helpful site is Faganfinder.com. Go there and click on URLInfo and you will love it. Type in your URL or that of a Pirate and find out more than you'd believe possible about both sites. You'll get more evidence helping prove a pirate stole from you! But aside from that, this is a smashingly useful site for a Webmaster to visit often.

  • Google.com can help you search for pirates, too. Take some of your more uniquely worded lines of text, put them in quotes, and ask Google to hunt for them. (You get broader results without using the quotes.)

    The results will include pages that have used that same text; some will be pirates. However, some results using that same text could be from your site's description that you gave to other agents to post on their sites when you swapped reciprocal links with them. Google will find such text. Obviously, that text is not a pirate's.


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