Yesterday, I went off on the Daily SearchCast about how Google AdSense makes it incredibly hard to report stolen content.
You and I see it every day. Some "evil" AdSense publishers scrape and steal your content, mix and match it with other content, typically from your RSS feeds and then post it on their own sites automatically. It takes them virtually no work. They write a script to publish your content, with their Google AdSense on their sites.
This has been happening for years and happens all the time. I learned not to let it bother me. In fact, probably within 30 minutes of me publishing this article, it will be scraped and published on a dozen other sites without my permission. This comes with the game of blogging, nothing we can really do about it.
However. Yesterday I told Danny that Google should make it easier to report this illegal activity. Right now, the only way to report it, is to file a DMCA request, make photo copies, fax the details with a legal document to Google and then wait.
Why can't Google make a form in the AdSense console to report this. The report can have ways to upload screen captures or Google can send a small little bot to cache the current page in question and store it locally for manual review.
Why should Google do this? Because they do it for within Google Webmaster Central to report paid links and to report spam sites.
Why does Google make it so hard to report stolen content when AdSense is slapped on that page? Why can't Google make it easier? Yes, people suspect they don't make it easy because Google makes lots of money from AdSense.
I think it is time Google steps up on this constantly growing issue and give publishers an easy way to report stolen content. Especially when Google has the potential to make money from it.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
