| I run a small independent trail sharing platform for hikers and backpackers, https://myhikes.org. MyHikes obviously has to compete in ranks against the big wigs like AllTrails, HikingProject, TrailLink, etc - which is impossible. This competition has lead one 'competitor' (I say 'competitor' because I make no money), HikingProject, to publish a trail 2 weeks after I published the same one. That's fine and everything since all public trails are public and people should be able to find that information in multiple places. But, the issue I'm having is the almost verbatim regurgitation of content that they included in text on their platform here:
https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7087026/dry-hollow-trail Compared to my original content published and indexed 12 days prior here:
https://myhikes.org/trails/dry-hollow-trail A lot of this content was difficult to write since I hiked the trail, internalized it, and came up with data that would be relevant to someone who needs minute details - including information that HikingProject should have known if they had any pictures for their content as well. So the best part about this terrible rewrite of most of my content is that now they rank above me in search. Additionally, they profit off of ads and apparently whoever decided to copy and rewrite my content didn't see the "Donate" button mentioning we run off of basically nothing. No one ever reached out to me to ask if they could use any information on the site, they just read it and rewrote it terribly. I'm posting this because this is the modern internet. The little guy gets screwed over even when they create something original. HikingProject has a better rank than MyHikes, great... but ffs, can I at least have a rank based on originality AND high quality content? |
I was able to speak with REI's AdventureProject's / HikingProject's content team and explained my side of the situation and they explained the content was user-submitted. They spend a lot of time and money dedicated to publishing content to make sure that it's not outright copying anything else. From what I could see in my database, REI had never been on that trail on MyHikes in the past, so the similar-looking data they published may have come from the user who added the trail. That user may have read the content on MyHikes and regurgitated it in HikingProject. I can certainly appreciate all of that since I have to sift through and process user-submitted trail notes as well, but I'm a team of 1 at a much smaller scale.
Their content team said they would remove the offending text that I felt was too close in relation to what I had wrote, which is a really cool response. They also mentioned they believe trail information should be available in multiple places for the hiking community - which I 100% believe in and is why I started MyHikes in the first place.
To wrap it up, I did not go down this road to try and take their content down just to keep a better rank - I truly felt like they had some information that had been ripped off and they were totally willing to change it to accommodate my concerns.