About two months ago I discovered that I had become banned by a review network called Blogitive from logging in and taking review opportunities. I was baffled because I had received no prior warning or email notification telling me I had been banned.
I fired off a very polite email, then another, then another and another. In total I must have sent about half a dozen emails and each time I received no reply at all, not even an automated message.
It was just by chance that I saw a tweet on Twitter from the company and sent a reply saying “I wish you guys would reply to emails”. Within an hour I received a DM asking me to email the guy in question. His name is Ed Shull.
After swapping a couple of emails, furnishing him with my information, he said he would pass it on to the people who run the review network and they would contact me in a couple of days. Fast forward to today and after over a week later with no news I sent him another email.
A couple of hours ago I received the following email from them:
Hi Dean,
My name is Chelsea and I am one of the managers at Blogitive. You were banned from our system for posting duplicate content. It may have been duplicate content across multiple blogs or duplicated from elsewhere on the internet. Because this was your first offense we are going to lift the ban on your account and give you one more chance. Please be aware that posting duplicate content and submitting it to Blogitive is strictly prohibited and we have a zero tolerance policy for it. Please let me know if you have any other questions about Blogitive or your account.
Thank you,
Chelsea Parry
So it appears that they banned me because they suspect I have been submitting duplicate content that I have scrapped from another blog. I was furious, I make a living doing this why would I be stupid enough to risk being banned by submitting a review post that I grabbed from another site?
I sent the following reply:
Hello Chelsea,
Are you saying that I have posted duplicate reviews to Blogitive? I have NEVER submitted duplicate content to your (or any other) network. If you have found one of my reviews to be similar to another review then either that is an absolutely 100% freaky coincidence or the person has copied their review from me. I make my living by writing reviews and would never be foolish enough to try and cheat by posting a duplicate review to any network.
I hope this email does not come over as me being nasty. I’m just trying to prove my innocence.
Thank you for letting me back in,
Dean Saliba
The more I read their email, the more I think somebody might have grabbed one of my reviews and tried to pass it off as their own and Blogitive have come to the erroneous conclusion that I have stolen it.
I am now awaiting their reply.
Article by Dean Saliba
Dean Saliba is a freelance writer, professional blogger, media enthusiast, dirty football player and huge professional wrestling fan who covers a wide range of subjects and niches including, making money online, traffic generating, pro wrestling, blog reviews, football, how-to guides, music, internet marketing and more.
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Dean has written 357 awesome articles for us at I Need Di$cipline
I am a 33 year old full-time freelancer & blogger from East London, United Kingdom, who has been working online since early 2001.
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Just as folks have been stealing comments, they’ve started stealing reviews too. Some folks are just plain stupid/jobless
I still can’t believe they have accused me of stealing reviews. I’m so angry I’m surprised the email I sent them was as nice as it was.
By the way, I hope me disabling that plugin means you don’t receive loads of emails now.
I only got the your comment has been approved email as well as your reply to my comment.
Thanks for letting me know, much better.
Thanks for the heads up. Last year I had a bunch of my articles ripped off and sold as PR articles. I never did get the guy responsible for this to remove them. From all I know he’s still selling them.
The only time I have posted duplicate content is on my personal blog when I will create a post with just a cool music video from Youtube.
Since I do this full time now I would not be silly enough to try and cheat.
I hope you eventually catch the guy who stole your articles before he steals anymore of your work.
Thank you Dean
You are very welcome.
I am sorry this happened to you. I have never even heard of this site until now.
It may be 24 hours since I got the email but I’m still hurt and very angry that someone could accuse me of this.
I mean, a lot of my content stinks, if I was going to nick content I’d nick good stuff.
This happened to me too. Practically Google has lowered my PR because it considered that I’ve used duplicate content on the site. In reality another site has copied one of my articles (entirely !) and post it. In the end we talked to the guys from Google and everything was solved. Hope this situation will get solved!
Good to see you got your problem solved.
I shall not let it rest, I will continue to email Blogitive until they eventually reply to me.
I had one of those sites do the same to me, accusing me of stealing content. Turned out the content they accused me of stealing was mine!
I am 100% certain that this is what has happened. I will not let this lie until they apologise.
Oh dear. Not good. I hope Blogitive sort it out in your favour. Wouldn’t be fair otherwise.
Oh it will be sorted. Even if I have to do what I did before (they ignored my emails asking why I had been banned) and contact one of the head guys in their parent company.
I didn\’t earn that much with them but it is the principle that they are accusing me of, well, theft.
Hope things are good with you, I\’ll have to come by and have a nose on your blog again.
I think the Blogetive should have a method or let’s say a software that would detect and determine which one is original and the copied one. All their allegations are seemed to be pointless and very unfair especially to those who are innocent and victims of plagiarized article. I just hope this problem of yours will be dealt accordingly by this company. Anyway, thanks a lot for sharing this post.
It was dealt with, I was warned not to do it again. lol
It’s a big problem as often it isn’t easy for anyone to definitively prove where the article appeared first. It seems thoroughly spurious that they’ve decided that your article was the one that was copied rather than the other one.
May be we need to set up an independent website where you can submit an article when you write it and they record the date it is first published, by whom and where. They wouldn’t publish the article just store the info in the event of a problem like this.
They could even open their archive to Google so they could spot duplicate article in their index and recognise the original one.
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I’d much rather just get an apology from Blogitive for falsely accusing me.