A few days ago, I stumbled upon the page fashionmaggie.com and was shocked: The page turned out to be a doppelganger of saraisinlovewith.com. They copied all the content I created in the last seven years, all pictures, texts, my branding, and even my logo. The only thing they changed is that they call the page Fashion Maggie instead of Sara is in Love with…
When I discovered this, I felt heartbroken and hurt since my work is an important part of who I am. Creating the unique and colourful Sara is in Love with… universe is my passion and I invest a lot of time and effort into what you see on this page.
When your car gets stolen it’s considered a crime, so you go to the police and ask for help. But what do you do when your intellectual property is taken without your consent? I tried a lot because I can’t tolerate this behaviour: I contacted a lot of people including the provider of my copycat, the company who sold them the domain, Google, an organization that deals with internet crime and spoke to a lot of people who work with the internet.
I talked to people in Panama, the US, Russia, Switzerland, and the UK, following the trail of my blog thieves and it is frustrating. Everybody keeps on telling me how terrible this is, but that they can’t do anything and that somebody else is responsible. Everything I achieved is that Google removed their advertisings from the clone page, but it’s still online and every time I think about it my mood darkens.
I really hope I can find a way to make this blog clone disappear because I am afraid of the harm it might do to my reputation and my page rank. I just want to say that it is truly not ok to steal another person’s content and declare it as your own, it’s theft! I think it’s even worse than stealing a handbag since Sara is in Love with… is my creation, my biggest project and there is much more of me on this page than in anything else I own. So please: Let my content be mine!
6 Comments
Oh no, that's awful! I totally empathize with your frustration as I've had content stolen in the past too. It must be some kind of mirror as even the comments left on entries are the same as your blog. It's weird, I don't understand what they could be gaining from it. I hope it gets sorted out for you!
Oh jeh ich kenne einige Bloggerinnen denen das auch passiert ist. Das tut mir echt leid.
Aber es gibt Wege das zu blocken. Ich drücke Dir die Daumen, liebe Grüße Tina
Wie hast Du das denn überhaupt gemerkt?
Tina from Pink Friday told me about the clone. Please send me per mail the url of the clone an I will try to help you.
BR Sunny
What an awful thing to have happened, Sara! I would have been quite heartbroken and upset as well. I do hope Sunny will be able to help you! Huge hug from Belgium xxx
I had the same thing happen years ago. I found a picture of mine on Google and realised it wasn't from my website, so went on to look and discovered they had copied years and years of blog posts (all the writing and photos). I don't think they used my header or name. The only way I could report it was by reporting one blog post at a time as copied work, with the url to theirs and my blog. I started doing it, then was like, this is ridiculous!! It took me long enough to write the original blog without wasting time going through this process. I know how you feel, it's upsetting, it makes you angry and it ate me up, so I had to forget it. I wasn't getting anywhere reporting it and it was wasting time I would rather have spent creating new blogs for my readers (for them to steal, hmmm). It P'd me off though that their photos were higher in the search rankings than my originals!! I don't know what to tell you, you have to do what feels right for you, but for me, I had to give up on it for my own health to be honest. I don't know if it still exists….I'm curious now!