Ask HN: I may have been spun. Is there anything I can do about it?

So in the shadier parts of the SEO world there's this concept called "spinning" where one takes a single article and programatically creates hundreds of small variations of it, largely by substituting words and phrases with synonymous terms. This is meant to work around Google's duplicate content detection algorithm). It isn't hard for a person to notice the similarities between the documents, but it is subtle enough (or computationally difficult enough) that search engines seem to be fooled.

I think that one of my competitors has taken some article content from my site, "spun" it (possibly by hand) and reposted it on one of those post-your-content-with-backlinks sites you sometimes find in search results. (Except they posted it with backlinks to their site, of course.)

If this was a direct, verbatim copy I'd contact the hosting site to notify them of the copyright violation.

But that's not what this is, it's more like a section by section, sentence by sentence paraphrasing of my content, with some other slight modifications (which is why I think it may have been done by hand, but I'm not familiar enough with spinning to know what's normal and what's not). I'm pretty sure that my content was the source document for this, since there are some unusual phrases that carried over to the new document, and the structure of many of the sections, paragraphs and sentences of the new document are identical to some on my site.

Both the site on which this content was posted and the site to which it is linking are legitimate business that I assume would respond to something like a DMCA take-down notice.

I'm well aware of the degree, nature and much of the mechanics of plagiarism on the web, and while I'm annoyed (possibly flattered) that it seems a competitor more or less plagiarized content from my site, but my bigger concern is this is the tip of the iceberg and I'm about to see dozens of close copies of my content floating around the web.

Is there anything I can or should do about this?

> If this was a direct, verbatim copy I'd contact the hosting site to notify them of the copyright violation.

From your description it is a derivative work. This is still a copyright violation. I can't comment on what you should do, though.

spin your content and use it for links first.

I don't know about copyright laws and I am not saying copyright is unimportant but from your post, I don't think your site got hurt in anyway. Aside from giving your competitors' a free lunch, why do you care? Especially if your site is the first one when people search for the title or keywords of your article. If you are still #1 on google search and did not have a drop in the # of visits, you might as well thank the competitors. Otherwise, I agree it's unfair.

Please don't. Same content from multiple domain names pointing back to the original is against Google ToS, and you might lose your PageRank unless you're Jason Calacanis in which case it's fine.