Copy Cat Property Management Websites
Property Management Websites Spain
Back in 2002, when Citrus Iberia first opened offering property management services, I wrote and built the website citrus-iberia.com. We were one of the very first professional companies on the Costa Blanca and also one of the first property management websites. It took me a year to put together, all the pages were written by my own fair hand – and there were a lot of them, information – newsletters and general pages covering management, rentals and sales. In those days, there were very few other sites out there and we featured top of the search engines for many years as each page was carefully crafted for both readers and SEO purposes.
Today, almost every property management website covering different areas of Spain has copied bits of my text – even whole pages word for word. I know my own writing and the words I use, and without a doubt these are blatent copies. I have sent many emails accusing these sites of plagiarism (and achieved nothing), I really am so ANGRY! Perhaps I should just take it as a compliment.
If someone decided to write a novel copied from, for example, J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter books, but called the character Henry Pollard – would they get away with that – of course not, they would be sued for copyright, so why doesn’t the same principle work for websites? That whole year I sat hunched over a PC with no income as we were just starting and I am more than a little peeved that others can just come along copying and pasting to their hearts content until they have a website that they put little of their own into. Although our original website has been recently updated, most of the text is the same – and you saw it here first!
Thanks to all the copying, with Google’s duplicate content penalties ALL of our sites are at risk.
Rant over, just had to get it off my chest. Perhaps I should ‘name and shame’, maybe next time – Debbie
Category : Blog