nalin - 5:09 pm on Sep 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

My site is unaffected by this issue - so perhaps I am less emotionally involved then many of the posters but I had a few thoughts I wanted to interject:

First and foremost I dont think that we can definitivly say that the redirecting sites are of higher or lower pr then the redirectees. Its been some months since green was updated so the pr you see was accurate 3-4 months ago - certainly not so today.

Secondly I dont think its accurate to say that the redirector is "stealing" pr. Many have posted theories that the redirecting *site* benefits from the PR which is simply not true - the redirecting *page* (which does not link to the redirecting site otherwise the content would not be identical) benefits from the pr and then the pr is assumingly lost (or passed) via the meta refresh or 301 to the redirectee. Perhaps the redirectee's are deprived of pagerank. Any attempt to misappropriate this pr - by the redirector - will by nature ensure that content is not duplicate and eliminate the association between the two sites - so in a technical sense it is not theft but deprivation. Given the inability to do anything with the stolen sites I dont see anything patently immoral with this - though I have not seen any of the pages or sites mentioned, nor the redirectors implementing this.

IANAL, but there seems to be quite a bit of talk of legal action and dcma violations and such. The DCMA - in this case does not seem to be applicable - the pages are not using your content inappropriatly (or quite frankly at all) rather they are saying "get this content from the URI...". At most perhaps one could argue the circumvention of copyright protection ("...or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner"). One would be hard pressed to demonstrate 200's as a technological measure of webpage distribution that protected copyright - and 301s as a device to circumvent this measure with little other legitimate purpose, but at least this argument is plausable. In short I dont believe google nor the redirectors are legally in the wrong - particualrly if the redirection is inadvetantly acceiving this effect. Rather I think it is an issue of ethical and moral ramifications.

I think the issue is a derogitory side effect of googles algorithm. Something about the way they measure and combine duplicate content has affected these sites in a negative manner - if I were to guess I think it has stayed in place over a year because it effects other sites in a positive and working manner and has only been noticably exploited as of late. Given the exploitations and that the issue has been raised to the forefront and is being exploited I think it will be fixed.