What’s wrong with this picture? Check the domain in the image and then check the content. Yep. That’s Chicago Bites content that’s been harvested and reused on another site.

If you go to the offending site, our content is no longer there. That’s only because we are diligent in monitoring our content and presence online and proactive in taking action when our content is misused.

How did I catch this and deal with it in under an hour?

1. I had previously set up comprehensive Google Alerts on my name, screen names, site names, and common misspellings. Alerts were set to “as-it-happens”.
2. I look at alerts as I get them. At minimum, I scan them daily.
3. I click through every link to see where it takes me. I’ve found that it’s not enough to look at the summary.
4. When I saw the Chicago Bites content on this site, I sent an email. However, I didn’t know who checked that email or how frequently they responded to inquiries. It was also doubtful the email went to a decision-maker.
5. So I did a whois look-up on the site to find the site’s owner and contact information. The information was listed.
6. I took a few minutes and screamed at the name on-screen. The importance of venting cannot be stressed enough.
7. I called the owner and politely asked him to take the content down. He did. It was all very civil.

There were other options if this hadn’t worked out. It’s possible to find the ISP of a site even if other information is private. Hosting services are pretty good about enforcing TOS clauses. Additionally, this site used Google Ads. I had the option of contacting them and demonstrating how this site was in violation of Google’s TOS. Since I took screen shots, I may still do that as a public service. Ours is probably not the only site that’s been harvested.

We put too much work into our site and creating original content to have others take it and reuse it word for word, image for image, mp3 for mp3. I strongly recommend monitoring your on-line presence because you never know if you’ll see your site on someone else’s.