Unbelievable But True

A few days ago I received an  e-mail from a woman who said she was a professional grant writer. She wrote that she was very upset because the website that she had developed last year was not showing up in Google searches and she wasn't getting any new work. She said a lot of very nice things about my site and asked if I could take a look at her website and give her some feedback about it. She has been paying a monthly fee to an SEO company to submit her site to search engines and increase her ranking, but it wasn't working.

Well, I'm no website development expert, but I've learned a few things along the way in the 10 or so years since I've had my site. I thought maybe I could help. So I went to her website. I'm not sure what I expected, but to my surprise it was nicely done -- well laid-out, attractive and well-written.  There were maybe 5-6 pages about her and the various aspects of her grant writing services.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this, so I was clicking through her site kind of quickly and scanning what she had written. It looked pretty good to me, although I noticed that there were a few things that were lacking. Then I go to her FAQ page and...BOOM! -- staring me in the face are five of the questions and answers that I have on my own site. She had taken them verbatim and just plopped them into her page along with a bunch of other questions and answers. I just could not believe my eyes.

I sent her an e-mail right then. I told her that I thought it was pretty strange that she would ask advice from someone whose work she had plagiarized, and I asked her to remove the material immediately. A day later I hadn't gotten any response and my questions and answers were still on her site. So I had to send her the nasty threatening letter (sigh). That pretty much did the trick. A few hours later she wrote back and said that she had removed my material. All she said was "it has been removed."  No apology, no excuses, nothing.

I had a hunch that maybe I wasn't the only one whose stuff she had stolen. So I put an unusual phrase from her site into Google and sure enough, up popped another grantwriting site. She had taken nearly two whole pages of material from this other site and used them on her site. At first I thought I should maybe contact the other site and tell them. But then I decided not to. I don't want to get in the middle of someone else's plagiarism problems.

I couldn't resist e-mailing her once again to tell her that I knew she had plagiarized extensively from this other site and that eventually they would find out about it. Then, since she had asked for some advice, I gave some to her: don't steal other people's stuff.

Is this unbelievable or what? Either she was playing some kind of sick joke or she had totally forgotten that she had plagiarized my material. My money is on the latter, but I guess I'll never know.