As an Hosting.com employee who writes a ton of content for our site, one of the most frustrating problems I encounter is when another site copies our content and uses it on their own site without permission. The fancy lingo for this act is content scraping.
As much as you may want to feel flattery when someone copies your content, it can be quite discouraging when the offending sites actually outrank you in Google's organic rankings. Thanks to Google's new Scraper Report though, you can let Google know about such occurrences. It's a simple form to complete. Just include the link where your content was copied from, the link where your copied content appears and the Google result where you are being outranked. Google doesn't promise immediate (or any) action if you complete this form. It's certainly a start though if you've been unable to get the offending site to remove your content.
On a side note, one of my favorite parts of my job is reading the response of a website after I email them requesting they take the copied content down. One site claimed to be updating their site anyway after I thanked them for removing the content. What perfect timing.
So how do you find sites who have duplicated your content? I have had a lot of luck (unfortunately) by using Copyscape. Copyscape is a free plagiarism checker for finding copies of your web pages online. All you need to do is search for your domain and Copyscape will show you where your content is potentially being copied.
