Someone Stole My Entire Website - And What I Did About It

The best thing about the internet is that whatever you publish online can go viral.

The worst thing about the internet is also that whatever you publish on the internet can go viral.

That’s why it’s important to be an ethical writer, because people won’t always remember the great things you did, but they will ALWAYS remember (and share online) all the lousy or unethical things you did.

I had a great “for instance” about this subject when I recently sold the domain name of my old website, writeaholics.net, along with the rights of the new owner to keep my writing articles (for SEO reasons, they said).

But they not only published my writing articles, but they stole all my website content AND they stole my website design too.

So I issued a DMCA Take Down notice to their ISP and the website was taken off-line.

I then wrote an article about what happened and published it at http://ruthiswriting.com/articles/2016/writeaholics.html where it will stay forever to let everyone know how unethical and untrustworthy the new owner of the website is.

I also sometimes find my marketing articles that I submit to ezinearticles.com, illegally published on other websites too.

What I do in these situations is issue a DMCA Take Down notice to their ISP or I send it to Google and ask them not to index the stolen articles in their search results.

Sometimes I also talk about my stolen content on social media, which is a dangerous place for those who act unscrupulously and get found out because talk online can quickly damage a person’s reputation for good.

So never be seen to do anything that seems unethical (or is unethical) and if someone steals your work, act on it and get it stopped immediately.

We writers work too hard for a living to be taken advantage of.