Geeklog Forums

I've got a question related to competing websites offering the same content using a CMS like Geeklog. For the past 7 years, I've had a relatively small site with a very narrow target audience. Recently, another site has aligned itself with the same narrow target audience and offers virtually the same content (links to news articles, anyway). They've gone so far as to cut & paste the text from classified ads on my site (my only revenue source) to their own site. Fortunately they are using PHP-Nuke, so at least the themes look different. It's not unlike someone trying to duplicate Slashdot's content and passing it off as their own. Has anyone else run into this problem? How do you differentiate your site from others offering the same content? Have you ever had another site attempt to virtually duplicate your own? With the increasing popularity of CMS packages to run websites, this has to be an increasingly common issue. Any suggestions or should I just try to ignore the situation and concentrate on continuing to do the best I can?

The approaches: 1: The MS/CocaCola response - Send them a cease-and-desist letter from a legal office promising to hang their personal bits over your trash-bin and beat them with baseball bats. 2: The Uberhacker response - Wget their entire site, hack the server and crash the Hard Drive, followed up by changing thier DNS entry to point to your site. Write a script that does this daily. Run it from a server in Europe. Repeat until Homeland Sec. shows up at your door. 3: The Sellout response - Send them a nice Email telling them that they are using your copyrighted content and you'd happily allow this to continue, if they will buy your site from you. Sell high, buy low. 4: The Dan(tm) response - Use thier IP and your status as an admin of a national ISP to find out where they live. Show up at thier house with a six pack of Guiness, a large can of gasoline, and a match. Offer them two choices; Make friends and you'll share the brew, Make war and you'll share the gasoline. 5: Play Dumb response - Copy _all_ the content from thier site and run a much better Back-end, say GL. Send them an email saying you have accepted their offer for trade and can respect their native american methods. (Where a trade can be initaited simply by taking something belonging to someone else, then the second party raids your home until they feel they have reached equal value.) 6: Partnership response - Find a way to merge the two sites. Do so. Twice the admins for your users. Honestly though, Whatever you specialize in there are going to be scores of sites out there. Theft is rampant. Everyone wants thier own slice of the "pie" and many won't even do a google search to see if your service is already out there. Ten thousand cooks. Just put an all out effort into making your site the best there is. One step is to use GL. --maximus of darja.2y.net

Unfortunately, what you are experiencing is quite common where someone duplicates another site. In the OS CMS world, it kind of encourages people to do this, but some go too far. One thing you can do is look in your logs and find his IP address. Then in your .htaccess file, ban his IP so he can no longer see your site like this: order allow,deny deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx allow from all If his IP is dynamic, you may have to ban using two or three numbers instead of four in which case you risk cutting off others in the audience you're trying to attract as well. This will help stop him from future stealing but doesn't really do anything for the current content. If his host is located in the U.S. and he is ripping off anything you originally created or has duplicated your overall content to where it's obvious what he did, you can send a DCMA letter to his host. When a host receives such a letter, they are obligated by federal law to take action to remove the copyrighted material you pointed out or be held legally responsible themselves. To avoid legal action, most hosts will act very fast. However, the DCMA allows him to submit a rebuttal in which case the info can go back up until a court decides. If he is stubborn, you'll have to take him to court to enforce your rights. This type of behavior is typical of small time people, and usually what happens is they don't rebut, the info is taken down, and then different material is displayed. This is fine because competition is encouraged in the world. Other countries may have something very similar to this type of system in the U.S. How do you differentiate your site from others offering the same content? Be original!! Write your own copy or get a group of people writing original content. One of the biggest evils of a CMS with a ton of plugins/blocks is it discourages orginality thus creating cookie cutter sites. It's definitely harder to run a site with original content, but you gotta give visitors a reason to come back to yours instead of someone else's site which has the same or similar info.

What are the sites in question?

Just for the purpose of illustration, here are links to the two sites in question.

FlightWeb
AirEMS

Here are links to an example of the copied content (classified ads)

Original ad on my site
Copied ad on their site

Well, scratch the DCMA idea. I looked through both your sites. The other guy may have similar content to yours but I don't see where he has duplicated your site except maybe for the ads section which is very similar. For the most part, you both are posting different material. Since neither of you are writing your own copy, it's bound to happen that you'll periodically cite the same story. In the links section, you both share some links and yet have quite a few different ones. Most of the info elsewhere is different too. As for the ads, he may or may not have gotten those off your site...just look for his IP and see how often he visits yours. To me, it just looks like you now have a competitor.