I Got My Website Back!!!

As I reported last week, I discovered that someone had taken the content of my lingerie party website. My wife and I spent a great deal of time creating a website to help people organize lingerie parties. But after more than a year, I realized that Google was only delivering search traffic to internal pages and completely ignoring the home page.

How did I discover the problem?? I did a google search on content from my home page and google delivered links to two websites, mine and another one; a website about lingerie parties. I contacted the owner of the website and asked that the content be removed. I waited a week and nothing happened. Two weeks went by, I heard nothing.

Frustated I decided to take the next steps. The rest of this post will document step by step what I did so you can do the same thing if you find that your website content had been copied.

I went to this whois website and entered the address of the website that had taken my content(http://www.xyz.com/) and clicked search.

If you do that for any website (http://www.xyz.com/) lower down you should see information for the IP (Internet provider) something like this:
XYZ.COM SITE INFORMATION
IP: 12.24.56.78
IP Location: San Francisco, United States
Website Server: Active
Server Type: Apache, blah, blah...

The number following IP: should be hyperlinked. If so, click on it. A page should come up telling you everything you need to know about the host, together with a contact email address. Hopefully the host is in the USA or some other friendly country. In my case it was in New York!!!! I struck GOLD!!!

I wrote an email to the owner of the website and I copied the email address of the IP company (internet provider) demanding that my content be removed. Within a couple of hours I got this response from the IP company:

"You will need to specify exactly which material (by completefilename, i.e. myimage1.jpg, myimage2.jpg, mypage.html, etc.) and you must swear under the penalty of perjury that you hold or you represent the holder of the copyright."

I sent back a simple email swearing under penalty of perjury, together with links to my site and the other site, as well as the content which had been taken.

Within 1 day I received an apologetic email from the Website owner (Finally!!) telling me that they were not aware that the content was taken from my site (Yeah, right) and that it would be removed shortly. The next day, I got a very nice email from the IP company asking me to confirm that my content had been removed. I checked and it was GONE!!!! Interestingly, I can see that there is other content on that website which is duplicate from other websites.

The other good news is that my website is receiving more traffic than before. It has a long way to go, but I am hopeful that things are getting better.

I hope you never need this information, but if you do, follow the steps provided above. Be sure to come back and let us know if it worked or not.