Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

I've got to go with a big "Y - E - S" on this one but apparently the engines don't all agree. When I reported the first in the list below I expected that it might take a bit but the duplication was so obvious (and from a MUCH newer site) that they couldn't help but take it down. As of today, none of the engines have penalized the site and I've received no response from the site owner (surprise surprise).

So that got me thinking, I wonder who else I taking our content? And thus was born a short list of sites that have stolen our content (short only because I'm only counting some limited homepage content - our articles and blog posts are likely the most stolen). Note, links are to the Archives.org pages just to make sure you can see what we see. :)

• http://www.seobean.com/ - These are the first guys I found. They've basically copied our whole site. I reported them back in August but they're still in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• http://www.madbyte.com/pages/search_engine_optimised.php - They took content from our homepage and services. Gotta love that.
• http://www.rpgcrew.com - This is my favorite. It's a role playing game site that's service is to get your players advanced in the cyberworld. If there was a service more geeky than ours - I've found it.
• http://www.customwebdesignatlanta.com/custom-web-design-services.html - They didn't take a TON of our content (i.e. we've found worse but they took enough of it to get picked up on the first and subsequent queries).
• http://www.planbturkey.com/google-optimisation.html - Ripped off tons from our services and homepage. They even took an image we purchased. Hope nobody let's the folks we bought the image from know. ;)
• http://www.ewelter.com/seo-services.html - Just a little bit of "borrowing". A bit, but enough to get caught in our searching.
  

Now that's just from some phrases on the homepage and without listing proxies. Eventually I'm going to have to just set aside a couple weeks of one of my guy's time to ransack the net and find all the offenders. Thanks thieves, it's only going to cost us lost productivity and a couple thousand dollars in employee time.

Labels: copyright infringement

Reputation management is an important part of running any business and to that end I like to periodically search the web for mentions of our company, my name personally (lost in many mentions of the Kinks let me tell you) and and what we've been doing. In a search over the weekend for references to my speaking engagement at SES on personalization I found the site SEOBEAN (owned by SoftBean). Admittedly I can't recall the phrase I'd used however that's besides the point.

I found a few similarities between our services and theirs. Let's take a couple examples:

From the Softbean property (SEOBEAN.com):
"SEOBEAN Search Engine Positioning ranks your website in the top positions on the major search engines. We know that your business needs success to survive in today's competitive economy, that's why we offer a 100% money back guarantee on our guaranteed seo and search engine positioning services."

From the Beanstalk site:
"Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning ranks your website in the top positions on the major search engines with our GUARANTEED SEO services. We know that your business or firm needs success to survive in today's competitive economy, that's why we offer a 100% money back guarantee on our guaranteed seo and search engine optimization services."

Hmmmmmmmmm.

And there's more

From the Softbean property (SEOBEAN.com):

• You will attain a minimum of 5 top 20 rankings on the major search engines across all of your targeted keyword phrases.


• Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more of the major search engines.


• You will attain a minimum of 3 top 10 rankings on the major search engines across all of your selected keyword phrases.

From The Beanstalk site:

• Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more of the major search engines.
• You will attain a minimum of 3 top 10 rankings on the major search engines across all of your selected keyword phrases.
• You will attain a minimum of 5 top 20 rankings on the major search engines across all of your targeted keyword phrases.

And just a pet-peeve, the claim to be "Keeping Promises Since 4 Years" and yet a simple whois shows that neither SEOBEAN nor SOFTBEAN have been around that long (both registered last year).

So a warning to SOFTBEAN, you've been reported to all the major search engines, we've contacted the directories you're listed in, and we'll be contacting the article directories you've submitted bastardized versions of our articles to. Oh, and this blog post will likely rank #1 or #2 for your name.

As a note, we are not malicious people. We just put in a LOT of hard work writing quality and educational content (we hope you agree). Copyright is a big issue for us and I certainly don't want the likes of SEOBEAN or SOFTBEAN (or whatever other properties they might own) benefiting from that.

Labels: copyright infringement, seobean, softbean

It's not too often I use our blog as a public whipping post but today is such a day. And today's target, Webmaster and owner of PPC engine SearchPronto.com (URL purposly not hyperlinked for obvious reasons) Matthew Rankin.

Now, why would I come out and name a person and a site that are ticking me off? Because he's stealing from us, that's why. Basically since the time we first started publishing articles and I've been tracking where they're being picked up I've seen the name Matthew Rankin noted as the writer of our works. Today I again came across an article titled, "Choosing Effective Keywords" and when I visited it I found that it was exactly the same as the first of our 10-part SEO series "Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website: Step One – Choosing The Right Keywords".

I've emailed the publishers in the past and many have changed the reference or removed the article(s) however it's just become too big a job to keep up with. I'm sure he's stolen from others too. I can't be that special. ;)

So Matthew Rankin: you've managed to tick me off and get yourself a special, personal mention in our blog. Unfortunately it's more in line with Steve Wilson than Jim Hedger.

Labels: copyright infringement, keywords, matthew rankin