How do you guys handle Marketing Copy Cats and blatant plagiarists?

[Manny Luna]

How bad do you want to take them out? Yes stop them from scraping his content!
Call me if you find the time to chat. Come on, don't you think he can handle this himself?
I just wanted to help him

Joe, you don't know me will enough yet, and I do not pitch.
That's not how I operate.

 

[Heather Gallay]

Hi...fellow Bay Stater here.

Funny story. I work for an automotive digital marketing agency that spun off from a Toyota dealer: the e-Commerce Manager and Internet Sales Manager were so successful at boosting Internet sales, that other dealers inquired about their methods. That lead to the development of our agency, Dynamic Beacon - which remains a division of the original dealer but functions (and is housed) independently.

Anyway, our first client was a dealer who saw our parent dealership's website and ripped off the entire thing - even snagged our original graphics. But when our guys approached him, they saw an opportunity and that dealership became our very first client! They're still with us to this day.

I know it's frustrating, though - it happened again to us recently, and this time the culprit was less than remorseful. We got the last laugh, though, because he literally just took screen shots and then cropped them down and posted them as images - so none of the content was optimized for SEM.

 

[fjlopes]

If I had nickel for every thing that was "borrowed", "stolen", "copied", etc... from me, I would be writing this from a place where its sunny and 78 degrees all year long.

I've even been asked to pitch a dealership who took all of my designs, ideas, strategies, etc and gave them to the agency I was brought in to replace (currently taking the same approach as the earlier post from Acton Toyota/Dynamic Beacon on that one)

The first time this happened to me was years ago. I called my client and said "Did you see that XYZ dealer ripped off our ad". My client said "yes, I saw it. Frank, theft is the best form of flattery. If he's stealing your design, its because its good. I hired you because you're the best, so this type of thing is going to happen".

Dont worry about it. Actually forget about it. You're obviously doing something right, so keep on keeping on.

Actually, I kind of like that layout....... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

[joe.pistell]

Cool tools FYI:
Copyscape Plagiarism Checker - Duplicate Content Detection Software
TinEye Reverse Image Search
Siteliner - Find Duplicate Content on your site

 

[yagoparamo]

Hi...fellow Bay Stater here.

Funny story. I work for an automotive digital marketing agency that spun off from a Toyota dealer: the e-Commerce Manager and Internet Sales Manager were so successful at boosting Internet sales, that other dealers inquired about their methods. That lead to the development of our agency, Dynamic Beacon - which remains a division of the original dealer but functions (and is housed) independently.

Anyway, our first client was a dealer who saw our parent dealership's website and ripped off the entire thing - even snagged our original graphics. But when our guys approached him, they saw an opportunity and that dealership became our very first client! They're still with us to this day.

I know it's frustrating, though - it happened again to us recently, and this time the culprit was less than remorseful. We got the last laugh, though, because he literally just took screen shots and then cropped them down and posted them as images - so none of the content was optimized for SEM.

Heather,

Copies are never as good as the original, right?

But you make a great point with not being optimized. Dealers sometimes miss that "looking the same" is not doing the same when it comes to indexing, SEO, etc.

You know, people like Manny know, others just copy what they "think" you are doing.