I was extremely disappointed to find that a local criminal defense lawyer, who we will call attorney x, had stolen content on his site.* The site takes liberally from many sites, but his criminal page is a word for word copy of William Foreman’s site. The theft is so blatant that the last paragraph still includes Bill Foreman’s name;
“No matter how serious the situation, William Foreman is a skillful and effective Phoenix criminal lawyer who will respond to the needs of each client”
Finding the offending content was easy. I just typed Bill Foreman’s url into http://www.copyscape.com/ and it told me that attorney x’s criminal page included 326 words of copied content. But how do we know who copied who? Besides the obvious Bill Foreman reference, there are a number of ways to establish who had the content first. One is by checking sites like the WaybackMachine http://www.archive.org/index.php where you can input any url and see what a site used to look like and when it was last updated. Doing this for attorney x we see that his website used to be a Lawyers.com template that was updated in September 2007 . (curiously just 4 months after I presented to attorney x and showed him examples of my sites – including Bill Foreman’s). Doing the same for Bill Foreman, we see that his content was originally added to his site in 2004.
Why Website Plagiarism Matters
Plagiarism matters for a number of reasons. For one, the existence of duplicate content can be detrimental to your rankings in the various search engines. This is because search engines care deeply about search experience! Having two exact results show up for the same query would undermine that experience and may impact the likelihood of a repeat searcher. Therefore, Google, MSN and Yahoo all work hard to scrub the results for duplicate content. In fact many of their pending patent applications involve ways of detecting duplicate content on the web. While I am confident that the search engines can determine who had the content first, there have been instances where the original content has been wrongfully penalized. This is one reason plagiarism is not tolerated at FindLaw and is considered a fireable offense for our content writers.
For attorneys, unauthorized plagiarism is also a matter of ethics. Lawyers are expected to uphold a higher standard of ethical behavior and the great majority of them do. One wonders what would happen if a law student turned in a plagiarized paper? I do hope that attorney x did not add this content himself. I also hope that he takes down the offending content immediately. *
My website clients make a significant investment in their content, in both time and money. I feel an obligation to help protect that investment. I also think its important to protect our writers. Creating search engine friendly content that also provides a great user experience is an art that our content writers take great pride. Therefore, I have created a “duplicate content” section on my BLOG in which I will identify blatant examples of plagiarized content moving forward.
*At 9:26 am on December 22nd I checked the site and found that the offending content was taken down by attorney x. My purpose of posting this information was not to damage an attorneys reputation, but rather to illuminate a very important problem that has the potential to really hurt my client. If a web designer supplied this content, I think its important that we learn who it was so that other Arizona lawyers do not fall victim to plagiarized content.