In my industry, we do all BORROW ideas from each other.  We look for web design layout inspiration, we look for cool graphics ideas, we look to stay on top of marketing trends, BUT, When it comes to copy and original artwork etc., there is no borrowing, only stealing.

I stumbled across a competitor web site today and was clicking through and noticing all of the similarities to my company web site when something struck me in their copy.  They were talking about all of the wonderful original work that they do at their company, but referred to another company’s name instead of their own.  I got to thinking about it and googled the other company name, and there it was.  Word for word, every page was copied content wise.  So, my competitor decided it would be easier to take the road less traveled and simply copy someone else’s hard work and make it their own. Ethically, I obviously have an issue with this, but further, the search engines could penalize BOTH web sites for duplicate content issues, so it turns into a lose / lose situation.

While I get off of my soap box, please consider this very useful tool to protect your web site copy and content: http://www.copyscape.com. It’s a great idea to check your web site every once in a while to see who is ‘borrowing’ from you. You may be amazed at what you find.

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