Did a PAW member copy my site? what should I do?

[Brandon]

Most of us speak on a daily bases, Dan is easily reachable. This situation was just unfortunate and my point is that Dan did nothing wrong. He tested functionality of the word press. A simple PM could have solved this and not mad Dan look bad.

I agree that anytime something like this should be OPENLY publicized, but just do just a bit of investigating first. So this doesn't happen

[PPP]

Obviously he did something wrong. dbirider got referals in his logs, so tha pages were accessible.

This should never, ever happen, and its good to point out things that should not be done, even if not meant to be malicious.

[dbirider]

Thanks for undertanding my situation PPP.

If this happened to me again from a PAW member then i'd probably make a thread about it again along with an email, private message, and instant message.

Imagine visiting my site except with his logo on it. That's exactly how it was browsing onlinepokermac.com. What if google was in the process of crawling it during those hours and decided to rank him for the content, while giving my site a duplicate content penilty?

Technorati and google blog search already have my copied content indexed from onlinepokermac, so it did have an effect http://technorati.com/blogs/http%3A%...nepokermac.com http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsea...G=Search+Blogs . According to these sites, onlinepokermac was live with my content for about 10 hours.

I figured this was the most drastic thing I could do to get something done fast.

Adioking,
I'm flattered you like the design. I put a lot of time into learning how to customize wordpress to run like a website and not a blog. Of course I don't like the idea of your 'designer' duplicating my site so he can reverse engineer it, but I guess I can't do anything about this.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I don't feel like any of this was done to directly hurt my site, so apoligies accepted.

----

Edit: OnlinePokerMac did infact get indexed with my copied layout/content http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=1 . The site is ranking for some of my homepage terms, although they seem to be below me.

[freydaddy]

All i can say is hopefully during the test the site didnt get crawled! It's hard to believe that a designer would do that just to run a test, he must not be a very proffessional designer, and i would look for a different company or person to design your sites!

[ResIpsa]

Originally Posted by PPP

Using someone else's basic structure and design is perfectly legitimate, but exact graphics or of course page text is not.

Color scheme or something like that has no copyright, but text or artwork does.

No copyright protections, but there are protections for trade dress. You can't just open a fast food hamburger restatunt using McDonald's exact color scheme with a new logo.

"Look... me and the McDonald's people got this little misunderstanding. See, they're McDonald's... I'm McDowell's. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds. "

[SmackDog]

Well said PPP.

SmackDog

[Graham]

Has your designed ever heard of creating a separate directory for testing? Why would you test to the homepage of a LIVE site? If you were really eager to test it on the index fo a site register a $10 domain just for testing purposes.

[CasinoMack]

Not to get technical, but he could run a wordpress site to test on his own computer with mysql server.

[edmc]

I copy sites all the time - use domains for that purpose just to learn. As long as there is no backlinks spiders cant crawl. If im wrong im sure Ill hear about it. Have copied adios sites b4 but my domains have came to a dead end so I thought that was fine

[freydaddy]

I dont know if that is true, i had a domain i used to show people sites and logos that i was selling them, and then one day the domain got indexed and it was a new domain that had zero links pointing to it!