It’s plagiarism day! Part 2: An agency steals everything
Per my post of a few minutes ago, I can laugh at simple-minded content thieves. But, as I’ve said in the past, so-called ‘professional marketers’ who steal other agencies’ sites and copy need to go to a special circle of Hell.
Today, I bring you Caerus Digital, an agency apparently located in New Jersey, not far from where I grew up.
Here’s their home page, with stolen text highlighted:
I found them with my traditional search-for-the-first-sentence trick.
But then a little voice in my head said, hey, this looks familiar:
So I suspect they actually lifted our entire site design, pausing only to crapify it in the hopes that no one would notice.
They even copied our internal pages:
Again, editing juuuuust enough to avoid (I guess) a cease and desist.
I’m not a total jerk
I’m not a total scumbag. I’ve certainly used other sites as models for projects. I’ve figured out how to create a button style I really like.
But I’ve never cut-and-paste entire sentences in the process. And by the way, that could not have been an accident. Our site uses a little javascript to insert a link back to us if you cut-and-paste our copy. So, they copied our writing, deleted the inserted link, and kept right on going.
Hmmm. Intent. If I remember from law school, that means something…
Nevertheless, I’ll give Caerus some benefit of the doubt – maybe, even though they’re a digital agency, they hired another agency to do their site, and those folks copied ours. Then Caerus decided not to check any of the site to make sure it was original, threw it up on the web and went to work. Hell, anything’s possible.
Regardless, this really hacks me off. In case you couldn’t tell.
Unrelated nonsense
- Agile SEO using Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)
- My followers are bigger than yours: On Twitter, quality trumps quantity
- SEO copywriting best practices, now on the Fat Free Guide
- Stop plagiarism in 3 easy steps
- It’s plagiarism day! Part 1
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