I'm in the process of launching a new (and long overdue) design site for my Oregon business. Blue Hat Design is the new moniker and it will serve as a blanket site for all of my web design business. The old site, JackWheeler.com will remain operable since I am still serving Chicago web design customers.
Writing copy is the biggest barrier for me. Good sales text is never easy to create and the difficulty is compounded by the need to be aware of SEO considerations. The first step for me was to do some Google searching for web design firms in other major cities and find out how others are currently presenting themselves. I randomly chose Atlanta and did a search for "atlanta web design". The third site I opened gave me a BIG surprise. Much of the content on the home page was identical, word for word to the content on my long-in-the-tooth Chicago web design page at http://www.jackwheeler.com! I was stunned to say the least.
My first thought was Gosh! I didn't think my old sales text was of such a high quality that someone would actually steal it. Then I started to get angry. It's the epitome of laziness to steal someone else's hard work. I mean, how much more effort would it take to keep the general idea, but change things around a bit and clean it up with a couple of original thoughts?
A little bit of research and asking around brought me to Copyscape.com. These folks offer a free app on their site in which you enter a URL and it will tell you up to ten other pages with identical content. How could I resist? I popped in my URL and lo! There were 5 other URLs besides the site in Atlanta! Now I was truly stunned. A total of 6 other web designers including one quite near Chicago had the same text copy copied directly from my web site. Maybe I should go into the copy writing business. I've always thought that was a weak link in my skill-set.
One of the sites had been recently updated and had my text removed. I sent polite but firm e-mails to the webmasters of the other sites and three of them responded immediately. Two said that they had hired others to write their copy for them. The third was confused and had thought that she had written all of the text on the home page and therefore couldn't have stolen it, but she couldn't be sure that she didn't have some help from others working on the site at the time. All three of them were polite and offered to remove the offending copy right away.
It's an interesting scenario and it brings up some questions regarding duplicate content. One being, "Do the major search engines penalize you for hosting duplicate content?". I will be looking into that and other aspects of content theft and/or reprinting as I move forward since along side my own writing, I'm considering hosting some articles that are freely distributed around the Internet. I believe the usefulness of the content will out-weigh any possible SEO penalties. We shall see.