If someone in the industry stole content from you . . .
 

How do you handle it when someone in the industry steals content from you?

It is my impression that, for minor infractions, most people don't get that worked up, so long as there is a link to their sites on a given page and their credits don't get removed. Like if someone posts a photo a program owns and gives proper credit or they repost part of an article with a link to the rest, I don't think most webmasters would be too bugged, even if the material was not promo content, so long as it was not really egregious. Then again, I know some webmasters bust out the lawyers for every photograph.

Sort of the point of having an affiliate RSS feed like SpookyCash has is for people to be able to syndicate some of my content legitimately, such that they send affiliate joins to my sites, and everyone gets paid.

But what do you do when someone in the industry sends you webmaster spam and, after being denied, stealth scrapes whole sites, including affiliate blogs, such that they show up in searches but have only unrelated (and poorly targeted) upsells on the actual pages?

You know, like, hypothetically, how would you handle a situation like that?

Sounds like it was automated and they may not even know yours or whoevers stuff was included. Not that it's an excuse, but just that it could've been scripted for bulk black hat seo rather than targeting anything or anyone specific. Have you contacted them first yet?

I emailed and ICQed. I suspect I don't have the contact info for the top folks at this particular company and their affiliate rep person was certainly unhelpful via email on the spam thing, so hard to tell if anyone with authority has seen anything from me or not. Giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I get why someone would SEO with whatever means they could think of, but I don't really understand why someone with niche product b would try to divert traffic interested in deeply unrelated niche product a. Seems sucky for program a and useless for program b.

I'm just kinda stumped and not sure how most webmasters would respond to a similar situation.