Thursday, January 25, 2007

It's Now Easier to Report Copyright Violations on Sites with Google Ads

If you sign up for "Google Alerts" using your name and the name of your blog they send you a daily e-mail when those words appear online. If you do it, you'll probably be unpleasantly surprised how many sites you'll find that are stealing your content.

For quite a while now I've been systematically reporting to Google when I find sites that are scraping my feed and using my content to create a "splog" purely to host ads. (Splog means spam+blog.) I am encouraged that lately I am seeing "this site has been archived or suspended" on sites that I have reported.

Recently Google has made it even easier to report copyright violations with only a few clicks on sites that have google ads. Here's how to do it:


1. Where the ads are click "Ads by Google"
2. In new window click "Send Google your thoughts on the site on the ads you just saw"
3. Scroll down, click "Also report a violation"
4. From menu, "The issue is with", check box "The Website"
5. From menu, check box "The site is hosting/distributing my copyrighted material"

You can leave your e-mail address or not. I don't usually bother to leave it unless it's a site that is consistently stealing from me.

Posted by Kalyn from Kalyn's Kitchen

3 comments:

Sam said...

perfect timing - thanks Kalyn for the headsup since for the last 3 days I have been the victim of such a thief who has google adsense. Last time I contacted google about something like this they told me I had to mail a letter and so lazily I didnt bother.

this time it was easy to report the violation.

woo hoo

Unknown said...

Thanks, Kalyn. I will take your advice.

Alanna Kellogg said...

When I do this, too often these days, I always point them to the site/post with the original material ...