Find out how to find it and report plagiarism to Google’s legal team
I have recently been finding copies of my work blatantly reproduced on other web sites which I wrote about in these two blogs:
If you want to find out if one of the above sites is copying your own content, you can start with a general search for copyrighted content from medium in Google like this:
medium site:levitrares.com
Right away you can see the levitrares [.] com is copying the entire medium site. Whatever they are doing by copying content this way seems to be harming Google search engine rankings, not to mention they are illegally copying copyrighted material, presuming Medium is not copying and reposting their own site.
If you continue own the list and onto the second page you can see that this site is basically copying a lot of people’s blogs:
If you have something unique on your blog posts you can add it to the query to try to narrow down and find your stolen content. My last name is pretty unique so I can search on:
radichel medium site:levitrares.com
I can see the this site is copying the main link to my blog below:
Click on the three dots next to the URL and you get a popup like this so you don’t have to visit the page. Copy the URL.
Now report that URL to Google’s legal team using this link along with a link to your actual blog with a copyright at the bottom.
If you want to find out if your blogs are on sites other than levitrares you can search for something like this where a dash indicates you want to exclude medium. Choose other keywords that uniquely identify your blog.
radichel medium cloud security -site:medium.com
In this search I noticed that my blog was listed as one of the best security blogs to follow. That’s pretty cool:
Interestingly, Medium would not let me publish this blog with a link to that site. I am not sure why and maybe you shouldn’t visit it but if you want to use this search in Google:
100 Best Cyber Security Blogs and Websites site:feedspot.com
However right after that I found another URL sabotaging my site which I will report. I’ve written about this site before:
Here are two more that look possibly suspicious (they may be ok). I happen to know that some malicious content comes out of Malaysia so I will avoid clicking that link and generally others if I can use an alternate way to confirm stolen content. Perhaps the wayback machine or I can open them in a cloud VM.
I guess I’m on a who’s who list. Seems cool but I didn’t click the link.
Found my book for sale on a site in the Netherlands. Cool. I hope that it’s a legitimate site.
Searching on attackfeed I see that pages are still in the index that I already reported. Have to see what I can do about that.
Lots of other things but I stopped at about page 5 and that’s pretty much all I saw. I’ve already reported about 10 URLs and Google promptly removed most of them.
Good luck hunting your own stolen content and getting it taken down. I really hope this helps others find and report plagiarism.
Teri Radichel
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