How to protect your startup from copycats

Has your website content been stolen? Medigo’s Ieva Soblickaite and Florence Collins tells you how you can protect it.

For close to two years, we’ve been building a website that never existed before. Medigo.com, the world’s largest free-to-use platform that connects patients and doctors globally, has been built with original ideas, design, content, and lots of love for our users.

Since healthcare is a popular topic in the startup world, it wasn’t too surprising that other players with exactly the same business model started popping up, and some were taking far too much “inspiration”.

We asked ourselves: what’s the best way to deal with copycat websites? And here are our top six tips.

1. Make sure you’ve actually been copied

There are lots of things you can’t own, and ideas are one of them. Style, web element, and content buried in the user funnel is also much more difficult to claim ownership of, compared to your on site copy and images.

A free and easy way to see if your content has already been stolen, is to search for your unique copy in Google and check for exact matches. You can also use tools such as Google’s search by image or Tineye’s reverse image search, which can identify even heavily edited versions of your images.

If you have found a copycat, be sure to document your findings! Take screenshots with timestamps and keep a log of the plagiarism you find.

2. Don’t lose sleep!

Copying happens all the time. Google knows about plagiarism and will penalize the copycats for indexing duplicate content at a later date. Many copycats are harmless, but there is the risk that users will find a copycat site and believe that it is the real deal! So while you don’t have to stay awake at night, you should assess their threat level.

3. Figure out who copied you, and why

Generally speaking, there are two types of copycats, opportunists and villains.

The opportunists are usually 1 or 2 man operations with no clue about what they have gotten themselves into. They make no market research, slam-copy your entire website and wait for users to come to them. Opportunists usually create an impressive-looking MVP in order to seek funding, but lack the skills, network, and experience to pull anything more serious off.

Any innovative site (Airbnb is a good example!) will have hundreds of opportunist copycats.

The villains are a smaller but much more dangerous group of copycats. They tend to be highly strategic, and analyse many startups in detail, assessing the market or even gathering insider information before deciding on the most promising ones to copy.

A group of smart business and tech people with a dubious business ethic assemble the founders like a boy band around a pop song. Victim in sight, the in-house product manager analyses the user funnel and leads an external agency to build a site. It might not look exactly like yours, but you can immediately recognise your ideas, elements and definitions.

These companies generally have a proper seed investment and a decent chance of getting an A-round.

4. Talk about it

Contact the site and politely ask them to remove the content that you own. On some occasions they will apologise and even feign ignorance. One site owner we contacted blamed the developer for stealing content – which showed that they had no content strategy whatsoever!

If they don’t respond, you can contact the site’s host and ask them to remove the site. If you’re still having problems, you can file a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) complaint. This is commonly used by big companies for violations such as torrenting, but could also work for you as well.

5. Have fun with scrapers!

If you are afraid your content is being scraped, you might want to check out some software solutions offering scraping “protection” or mitigation. There’s Cloudflare’s Scrape Shield but also some other companies who offer similar things, and various technical measures to stop scraper bots.

If you have time and resources, you could manipulate the scrapers into scraping a tweaked version of the site. It’s usually the slapdash opportunists who get caught out, by making use of your nonsensical content without checking it beforehand.

6. Stay ahead of the copycats

This is particularly true for smart Villain copycats. Check to see if they have any competitive advantages, and make sure to stay ahead!

Monitor your site for abnormal traffic spikes. Smarter scrapers use proxies and incognito modes to get your content, but you can still keep an eye on Google Analytics page view traffic, spiked request activity, and logs. You might actually know exactly who is scraping your website by checking where their IP address is registered. (And some scrapers are just plain sloppy.)

You can also outsource your copycat monitoring: Copyscape offers a service called Copysentry which scans the web daily for copied content.

It is a good idea to monitor the less blatant copycats.  These are usually the smarter villains, who steal your concept and style but go easy on the images and copy. To check for new sites, set up a few Google Alerts for your top keywords.

Finally, it is important to remember that a company is more than the website: your team, the relationships that you’ve built with your users, your network of partners, and the lessons you have learnt along the way are what makes it so special.

The components that someone can copy are just the very tip of the iceberg, and without the underwater structural support, they are likely to melt away.

Ieva Soblickaite is CPO & co-founder of Medigo and Florence Collins is Medigo’s head of content

This story originally appeared on Tech City News. Copyright 2015