Online plagiarism is rampant. Some folks just rip off your entire site look. Others just steal your content.

What to do?

First, there are ways to root out the thieves: Cut-and-paste a sentence from your web site into the search box on Google or Yahoo. I do that regularly with the first sentence of my corporate site, PortentInteractive.com. I did it this morning, and voila, the second listing is a rip off of my site: Here’s the Google search result.

Ekrupa? Who the heck is that?

Well, whoever they are, I don’t like it. So my next steps are:

1. Send a polite but firm note to the web site owner.

2. Notify Google of the site using this form.

3. Notify Yahoo using this form.

If all else fails, I’ll call a lawyer. I haven’t had to do that yet, though.