Somebody Copied Your Website

What you actually own

Copyright exists automatically in original work from the moment it is created, without registering anything.

Which covers the text you wrote, the photographs you took, and to some extent the layout and design of the pages themselves.

It does not cover facts, ideas, or the general structure of a service page, so a competitor listing the same services in the same order has done nothing wrong.

The distinction is between somebody doing the same thing and somebody using your actual words and images.

This is a general description rather than legal advice, and anything significant is worth putting in front of somebody qualified.

Establishing what happened

Before doing anything, document it properly.

Screenshots of the offending pages, clearly showing the web address and the date they were taken.

A copy saved of the pages themselves, since they may be changed once you make contact.

Evidence of when yours was published: archived versions of your site, the original photograph files with their embedded dates, or your own records.

That last one matters, since the question of who published first will be the first thing asked.

The order to try things

• Contact them directly, politely, first.
• Contact their web designer, who frequently did it.
• Complain to their hosting provider.
• Request removal from search results.
• Take proper legal advice if it is worth it.

The second is worth trying because a great many copied sites are the work of a designer cutting corners rather than a decision by the business owner, who may not know.

A worked example

A business that found a competitor two towns away using their service page text almost verbatim, with the town name changed.

Their first message was to the competitor, brief and not hostile, saying what they had found and asking for it to be removed.

The reply was apologetic and genuine: the owner had paid somebody to build the site and had no idea where the text came from.

It was removed within a week, and the two businesses have since referred work to each other twice.

A hostile first message would have produced a defensive response and probably a slower outcome.

Which is the general pattern here: the direct approach resolves the majority of these cases, and it costs one email to try.

What a takedown involves

The administrative route, which works and is unglamorous.

Hosting providers have a process for copyright complaints and are obliged to respond to properly made ones.

It requires identifying the material, the address where it appears, your ownership, and a statement made under penalty, so it is not something to file carelessly.

Search engines have an equivalent process for removing pages from results, which does not remove the page but does remove its visibility.

Both are free to use, both take a few weeks to resolve, and both are considerably more effective for a small business than anything involving lawyers.

Whether it does any harm

Worth assessing before spending effort, since the instinct to act is stronger than the actual damage in many cases.

Duplicated text can affect how search engines treat both pages, and where the copy is on a stronger site it can occasionally outrank the original.

That is the concrete harm and it is worth checking rather than assuming: search a distinctive sentence from your page and see which site appears.

Where yours ranks and theirs does not, the harm is mostly to your patience.

Where theirs ranks above yours, it is a commercial problem and worth pursuing properly.

The counter-case

Where it is not worth pursuing.

A small amount of text on a site that ranks for nothing and reaches nobody, where the effort exceeds any harm.

Anything you did not actually write, such as supplier descriptions or manufacturer copy, which you do not own.

And generic material that many businesses use, where establishing originality is difficult and the claim is weak.

The strong cases are distinctive text you wrote, your own photographs, and anything containing your customers' words or your own trading details.

Being copied is not the same as being outranked

Worth separating, since the two get conflated.

A competitor writing better pages about the same subjects, in their own words, and outranking you has done nothing wrong.

That is competition, and the response is improving your own pages rather than complaining.

Copying is specifically the use of your material, and the remedies above apply to that and not to being outperformed.

Which is worth being honest about, since the discovery that a competitor ranks higher frequently prompts a search for something objectionable.

When it is your reviews or your customers

A more serious version worth separating.

Copied reviews, attributed to your customers, on somebody else's site is misrepresentation as well as copying.

The same applies to photographs of work you completed presented as theirs, and to certifications or insurance details taken from your site.

Those are worth pursuing more firmly, because they mislead customers rather than merely borrowing words.

They may also engage consumer protection rules rather than only copyright, which is a different route and worth proper advice.

Preventing it being easy

Limited options, and worth being realistic about them.

Nothing prevents copying, since anything a browser can display can be copied.

What helps: photographs that clearly show your van, your team or your branding, which are awkward to reuse.

Text mentioning your town and business name naturally throughout, which makes lazy copying obvious.

And a record of when things were published, which makes proving originality straightforward later.

Disabling right-click and similar measures achieve nothing at all and irritate ordinary visitors who had no intention of copying anything.

What to do

1. Screenshot everything, with dates.
2. Save copies of the pages.
3. Establish when yours was published.
4. Email them politely first.
5. Then the host, then the search engine.
6. Take advice if it is significant.

The fourth resolves the large majority of these, and the first three are what make everything after it possible if it does not.

Most of these end quietly with an email and a removal, and the documentation is what makes the harder cases possible if it comes to that.

The photograph side of this is covered in using a photo you did not take.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.