The system of policing the internet can actually work. A couple of months ago some forum users sent us a note that they’d spotted a site in the US that had lock-stock and smoking barrel stolen the content of the forum.
I don’t just mean similar categories I mean they were grabbing people’s user names and entire threads, and copying them directly to make it look as if their forum was huge and had a great deal of content.
The aim of course is to make them look big and popular, build credence, attract search and undoubtedly then try to flog as many products as possible on the side.
We tried to get in touch with the site owners, who as usual in these things ignore all contact – so we went to the ISP and asked for the site to be taken down.
And thankfully received this from it today:
“Hello, we received no response from the downstream user and have disabled the site”
Now click it and the copycat has been terminated.
PS I’ve deliberately omitted the site name so it doesn’t get any search relevance from a link here.