I have had to deal with lot of copyright violations for the content our writing team generates but most of them have been by small sites who think they will pass through the crack.
But I was surprised to see a reputed firm (I am not sure if I can all them reputed) like www.topseos.com following un-enthical practices by violating copyright openly.
Our writers publish lot of articles on ezinearticles.com to promote our sites and our client sites. The content published on ezinearticles.com is protected by copyright and they have clearly specified rules on how you can republish them. But TopSEOs.com decided to copy those articles on their site and replaced the links in the author signature with their own links, pointing to their site topseos.com (clear violation of copyright).
We published an article on Top 10 must have SEO Tools on ezinearticles.com here: http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-10-Must-Have-SEO-Tools&id=2716896 TopSEOs copied the article on their site with our author name and conveniently replaced the author links with their own links. See for yourself: http://www.topseos.com/articles/vikas-s/top-10-must-have-seo-tools/9013/ (pay attention to the author links at the end of the article)
Update (September 9, 2009): Two days back I got another call from Scott (@Top SEOs) saying that they had fixed their articles to comply with EzineArticles publishing guidelines. I did go to the website and check few of the posts and they are in compliance now. I would like to congratulate them for taking the right step.
Update (Aug 16, 2009): I got a call from guy named Scott @ TopSEOs.com. It was a long conversation and they have decided to restore the author links to the original urls. I checked just now and it seems like they have restored my deleted article with links but I can still see them inserting additional links in other author’s article. I hope they are in the process of changing this as Scott said he should be done with all changes to make the articles compliant with ezinearticles republishing guidelines in 4-5 days. Will keep you guys updated. This is a positive step by TopSEOs.com in the right direction. Let us wait for the articles to be fully compliant.
Update (Aug 15, 2009): TopSEOs.com has removed our specific article mentioned in this post but they continue to keep other author’s work and manipulate the signature to get their own links. I had kept a copy of snapshot of the article when it was live on their site and even now Google index shows our article. Here I have attached both:
Original snapshot (now removed on site) - Click to enlarge
Google cache of article (click to enlarge)
Till date no apology from TopSEOs.com and they think they can remove mine and get rid of the issue. They have copied almost every article on their article section from various article sites and changed the link to their sites. Just search for the title of articles on Google and you will see the sources from where these articles have been copied. I am amazed that they decided to go with ignoring this. If you are one the victims, please join hands to discourage piracy and bring the perpetrators to justice. Some authors whose content has been most likely been copied are: Hardeep Sharma Singh, Wendy Maynard, Steve Hochman, Billy Ojai, Jordan Gottlieb, Maria Johnsen and many more. I would request you guys to be a part of this campaign.
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