When digital theft is a good thing!

This is definitely a first for me in my entire online career - but I really hope it happens again! It involves the borrowing (read that: theft) of the design and layout of a site. Normally that would bother me - if you're going to borrow design ideas from another site, at least make it your own. But in this case they simply downloaded a page from the site, modified the content and logo, and uploaded it as their own site!

So why am I happy about it?

Well, it all starts with landing a new client. One of the first things we do with new SEO clients is to check their current link profile. So, after verifying the site in Google Webmaster Tools, I hit the external links section. I was surprised, for being a PR4, they had only a handful of links. So, there must be some good links!

As I clicked through them to verify their quality, my eye was caught by one in particular. It looked exactly the same as my client's site, just with a different logo! I looked around, and there was no affiliation whatsoever. So this was clearly a disparate organization whose web designer was a very lazy one. It was readily apparent that they had stolen everything, just changed the logo and the navigation bar to suit their website.

So, how were they linked to my client's site? Well, at first it wasn't obvious, but as I scrolled to the bottom, there it was: their lazy designer was too lazy to change the footer! Yes, all of the links in the footer navigation were the same as on my client's site, and in fact, they all still linked back to the site as well!

I will not be contacting this organization regarding the issue  :). I hope they are lazy enough to not change their site for a long time, leaving us that juicy stolen link for some time to come.