I like helping people. I think anyone who knows me well would attest to that.
About two days ago, I noticed a nasty drop in click thru rate on a profitable campaign that I had going on Google Adwords for about 3 weeks. Along with the drop in ctr there was also a drop in conversions.
Well, there had to be an explanation for this sudden change so yesterday I made it my business to investigate.
I used the Competition Spy Tool inside Wealthy Affiliate and searched one of my keywords.
The search returned three results including mines in the top spot. Surely enough, there was another ad that looked exactly like mines.
I’d found it. Someone had copied my ad word for word! So they were taking a share of my clicks using my ad copy. Ouch!
But the shocker was about to come.
My next move was to check out the landing page of my competitor.
When I clicked through to their landing page, I had to look in the address bar twice just to make sure. The landing page was an exact copy of the one I was using…same images, same layout..same content! The only thing different about it was that they had modified it to fit in a Site Rubix template. That’s when I realized that it was someone at Wealthy Affiliate.
Who Was It?
By now I was steaming mad.
This kinda thing had happened before but not to me. Some people are just so lazy that the only way they can get anything done is to use Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V on other people’s hard work.
A whois query on their site turned up nothing. Thank God for private registration, eh?
Then I found a leak on their site to an article on Squidoo. On their lens I found the link to another of their sites.
This time it was a site that I’d been to before and that sucked because it meant only one thing…
I was helping this guy!
I knew him. I had helped him for over a year through private messages and even had him on messenger.
He always asked for advice and I had come to trust him. Seemed like a hard worker too.
What I Did.
Now I won’t have minded as much if someone who I didn’t know had done their research, come across my campaign and copied it. But this was someone I knew and helped out.
My first instinct was to confront him on messenger.
I played it cool at first before dropping it on him that I’d found his site and he was doing something really slimy.
I threatened to expose him on the forums and thats when the apologies and the offers to delete their campaign came. I was mad and he knew it . He admitted to being slimy and even offered me the full earnings he’d made from his campaign.
I declined to take his money and even encouraged him to keep his campaign running if he liked.
However, I let him know that I was deleting him from my contacts…which I did…and that I’d stopped helping him.
I would never steal anyone’s hard work and I would defend my hard work however possible it was. Some people could just go so low. I hope I never have to deal with this again.
Have you ever been plagiarized? How did you deal with it? I’d love to hear.
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No it hasn’t happened to me yet but we all take that chance putting our sites out there for the lazy and uninspired to take for their own. But to have one of our own at WA blatantly copy it is weak and pathetic at best. Sorry to hear it happened to a good person like you who was helping the idiot who chose to steal from you. He should be banned from WA!