I Could Not Believe What I Saw

I was checking my Google rankings last week for some terms that I normally don’t look at, and as usual I saw that Rentals.com had the number #1 spot, however something caught my eye in Rentals.com’s result.

In the snippet of the Rentals.com result something looked very familiar. After reading it twice, I said to myself, “Hey, I wrote that.” The next thought in my head was, “Oh, Google must have screwed up some how and put my text there - there is no way Rentals.com would have copied it.”

So I went to the actual page on the Rentals.com site and then pulled up the corresponding page on my site and sure enough an entire paragraph had been copied word-for-word from my site.

I had to call my wife over and have her look at it, perhaps I was missing something. She saw the same thing. So odd to see a large company copy from a small one, typically it is the other way around.

My next thought was, “Wow, I wonder how long”. So using the WayBack Machine I noticed that it had been copied as far back as August or perhaps earlier than that.

To be honest I was not mad or upset, mostly curious how this could have happened. I have never filed a DMCA against anyone before because you can usually never find the person to file it against, so I thought calling Rentals.com directly would be the best course of action.

So I picked up the phone and dialed Rentals.com (that felt strange). I had a conversation with an employee of Rentals.com.

The person I spoke with was nice and told me action would be taken right away. Sure enough and hour or so later the content was gone.