I’m a part-time writer. I don’t make a living from posting on Medium but I work hard on what I post. Like you, I know whatever I post represents my personal brand. So I took it personally when some team of internet SEO jackasses copied my top-performing Medium article, pasted it on their “fake” website, and then stole my top-ranked keyword search.

If you’d like to learn how easily your best work can be stolen — seemingly with complete impunity, read on. I’ll share with you the shocking things I discovered about how few safeguards there are to protect your work from plagiarism, as well as the steps and tools I used to seize back control of my plagiarized Medium article.

1. How my article was stolen
2. How I seized back control of my article
3. Final thoughts

I post about once a week. I write for practice and I write for fun. Usually, nobody reads my articles except for friends and family. But sometimes … every once and I while I knock one out of the park and receive a few thousand views. Two weeks ago, I posted my most successful post to date — just over 16K reads to date as I post this article.

Two weeks ago I posted;

Views started slowly even though Medium distributed the story to readers on its network within about a day. However, where the article really took off was through organic search. For the first 3 or 4 days, 75-80% of the people reading my article were directed through organic search results.

I started searching for my article. First, I searched for ‘the great bull trap of 2020’ — sweet, number 1 search position. Next, I searched for ‘bull trap 2020’. SWEET! Number 1 search position. Finally, I searched for ‘bull trap’. Initially, I found my article on page 3 but within two days, my article was consistently a top one or two search results for the term, ‘bull trap’ on Google. Organic search results started flooding into Medium.

Soon after, Medium’s algorithm must have noticed the discrepancy and kicked in. Readers became more equally split between Medium subscribers and organic search readers. On day 6, my article received a little over 4K views in 24 hours. Solid volume and a solid number of people reading the whole article. As more Medium readers started viewing my article, naturally my income stream rapidly grew in response. Great success!

However, the good times were not to last. Almost exactly a week after posting my article, I noticed the number of views sharply started decreasing. I wasn’t surprised to see a drop off of Medium readers but I was a little surprised to see such a sharp drop off of organic search. Of course, the search phrase might be trending lower, but I thought I’d better take a look. I searched the term, ‘bull trap’ again to see what was happening.

How my article was stolen

It was gone! My article was nowhere in the search results. In fact, I couldn’t find my article at all unless I searched for, ‘the great bull trap of 2020 — Edward Iftody’. Naturally, I wondered how so suddenly I had lost my top search position.

Shock number 2 — The top search position was claimed by a ‘financial website’. When I clicked on the link I was redirected to — a full copy of my article. Word-for-word, photos, and hyperlinks included. The only thing missing was a forwarding link to my original article on Medium. I was stunned!

Who the hell would have the balls to steal an entire article?

I contacted the website’s ‘editor’ but of course, there was no response.

I was even more concerned with how easily they stole my first place search result and buried my article down 100 pages. I contacted the ahrefs YouTube channel for help. They are experts in SEO but even ahrefs seemed a bit surprised by the ability for a random fake website to seize control of a Medium search result. Ahrefs thought the only way my search result could have been stolen was if the fake website had built a significant number of backlinks.

Now, keep in mind by the time my article was plagiarized, I had many, many backlinks from people posting my article on twitter and Facebook. However, it turns out search engines don’t value backlinks from social media as much as from random websites.

I did a backlink search and found only 7 websites pointing to the stolen article. In the end, it seems the thieves used a relatively small network of other fake financial websites to backlink directly to my stolen article. By having these backlinks, they were able to fool the search engines into believing the relevant source document was on their website and my original Medium article was a copy.

My journey got weirder.

How I seized back control of my article

Of course, I immediately contacted Medium to ask for their advice. Unfortunately, it was not within their legal ability to help me. However, I was pleased they at least confirmed the offending website was suspicious — see the last line of the email I received from Medium below. Medium also made a couple of other suggestions, like contacting the domain registrar. So, I did.

I looked up the domain registrar and contacted them — but to no avail. Unfortunately, the best they could do was to forward an email to a website owner who already was ignoring my contact.

NameBright.com <contactus@namebright.com>

Fri, Apr 24, 10:22 PM (5 days ago)

to me

You are contacting NameBright.com, we are a registrar not the registrant (owner) of the domain. We cannot assist you in this matter as we do not have ownership interests in this domain. Further NameBright.com does not offer any hosting services and we are not the hosting provider for this domain. You need to conduct a Whois search and contact the registrant directly or search the IP address and contact the hosting provider.

Here is the whois information:

https://www.namebright.com/Whois/tradersmagazine.com

We understand this customer may have privacy protection and their information is not available in that case you may want to contact an Intellectual Property attorney in this matter to discuss your options and the proper venues to handle this matter as well. Despite having privacy protection, you may contact the registrant at the email address in the public whois records and it will be delivered to the registrant.

Registrant Email: tradersmagazine.com@NameBrightPrivacy.com

I’m sorry but we do not have the authority to adjudicate your averments in this matter as trademark and copyright disputes are private civil matters between the trademark/copyright holder and the domain registrant.

Thank you,

NameBright Support

Contact an intellectual property attorney? Are you nuts? The last paragraph from NameBright really hit home —

I’m sorry but we do not have the authority to adjudicate your averments in this matter as trademark and copyright disputes are private civil matters between the trademark/copyright holder and the domain registrant.

I thought, ‘What hope do creators have if the only available course of action is cooperation from the very website that stole your content!’.

I was about to give up but the thought of giving up disgusted me. So, I stubbornly pressed on. I searched how to report plagiarism and was pleased to find copyright removal request forms on both Bing and Google (posted at the end of the article). I’m happy to report, the forms are not that long and are fairly straightforward to fill out.

Bing removed the copyright infringement in a few hours. Unfortunately, Google took a number of days. There’s no way to know how many views and how much money this cost me but I’m happy at least Google finally concluded the investigation and I’ve regained my top search result. Great success!

Final thoughts

YouTube is famous for demonetizing offending videos for the smallest of infractions. I’d love to know how YouTube can detect a few seconds of copied video or audio so quickly, but can’t tell when an entire 13-minute read article is copied to another website, word-for-word.

First and foremost, search engines have a duty to do a much better job of protecting copy-written material than they are currently doing. I’m not saying it’s easy, or profitable, but if major search engines don’t get more involved, new publishers will continue to struggle in a ‘wild-west’ environment.

Second, I would love to see Medium get a little more proactive. Copyright infringement isn’t only hurting writers, it’s obviously hurting the growth of Medium as well. Many of the new followers I have over the last few weeks are often only following me, … and Medium! Clearly, there are a number of new Medium subscribers who were introduced to Medium by finding my article in organic search results. Come on Medium — help us help you!

Finally, if you’re a Medium contributor with a trending article, I suggest the following;

1. Search on major engines to see what keywords or key phrases you rank for.
2. Watch your ‘external’ view numbers — if you see a big move up, check who’s sending you the traffic — you might owe a blog or YouTube creator a thank you for mentioning your article. If you see a big move down in organic search, check your ranking and make sure another website hasn’t simply stolen your article.
3. If you are a victim of theft, contact the website that published your material without permission. Your articles by default are copyright protected and require written permission from you for another website to publish them. Don’t wait for a reply. Thieves usually don’t call back. Instead, contact the search engines ranking the stolen article immediately and request the offending URL be removed ASAP.

Google’s copyright infringement removal form — click here.

Bing’s copyright infringement removal form — click here.

Interesting note: To the best of my knowledge, Yahoo never ranked the infringing article above my search results. Thank you, Yahoo!

Disclosure – It is simply my smoldering rage and the desire to help the Medium community protect their work that motivated the drafting of this post.

There are NO affiliate links in this article and I am not being paid to write this post.