At what point are "web scrapers" crossing the line?

[seovshate]

Hello,

Can you define the difference between "SEO" and Online Harassment / Bullying?

At what point are "web scrapers" crossing the line and should be held accountable somewhere, but where?

Let's say you have a website and post articles that nobody will find on the internet.

Now let's say you have a competator that is scarping your website and immediatly re-writing this news and sharing it to 10x the amount of fans as yours.

Now imagine this competator also has 5 more websites and will continue to post on these websites every hour or two, the content you worked hard to find and write about to make sure they flood the "rankings".

Imagine this happening every, single, day where this competator is comepting against your keyword searches with 5 websites scraping you.

You will try to change your posting time, but it won't matter if you post the article at 6 AM, 1 PM or even 9 PM. It will happen.

I was able to block this competators proxies and hacked machines that allow them to get this content and it has actually made things worse.

They are now like manually monitoring my pages and there is nothing I can share that isn't reposted by the same person in 1 hour. This includes writing the entire article and making images for it and sharing it..

We both have Adsense as a publisher and I am failing to understand how this is being allowed to happen.

Is there anything that can be done in this situatoin? Or is this now the state of the internet?

Basically, anybody who creates news or content is being harassed and bullied (or is it "SEO") to compete directly aginst them. Then throw the content to AI Writing and more.

All of the recent AI etc has made them create even more websites and it basically makes looking for news pointless. But if I don't post it, nobody does.

Can somebody give me direction or advice? How do you stop the "Ultimate Hater" who is obsessed with copying everything you do?

If it was every once in a while, sure. But it's every single day every hour.

I consider it similar to Company A following Company B and waiting until they leave the customer's house. Then knocking on their door and offering to do the same monthly service work for 20% cheaper than the company they currently pay. For every single customer, because it's "cheaper" to attempt to steal customers than to source and find their own customers basically.

If anybody says to "find a lawyer" can you please post the lawyers information as well? I can't seem to find anybody who takes on these types of cases and would love any type of direction or offer from anybody.

Thank you for listening!

[seovshate]

One last thing for reference and then calling it a weekend.

It's a very competitive niche.. the last time i was able to fully block them was Mid November (exactly right before this has gotten way worse).

Basically in less than 48 hours (without him reposting everything I do), my traffic increased over 10x the amount. In just 24 hours, I had almost 3x the users on my website.

Happy Friday.

[thecoalman]

If someone was that persistent in stealing my content and causing significant financial harm I'd be consulting a copyright lawyer. You can lay a trap by registering an article before publishing it on your site. Registering before infringement opens the door for collecting attorney fees and more damages.

---------edit---------

My mistake, I see you mentioned lawyers at the end of the OP. Most of these lawyers are probably not interested because it's not registered. A registered work raises it to another level.

[seovshate]

"My mistake, I see you mentioned lawyers at the end of the OP. Most of these lawyers are probably not interested because it's not registered. A registered work raises it to another level."

What do you mean by registered work? I can't seem to get anywhere with a lawyer.

Basically yesterday there were 2 "awesome" articles that I worked all day for..

The first one the guy did this trick and stole it to appear to post 4 minutes before me..

The other post he stole 3 hours later, literally 10 seconds after a comparator "found it" too...

The thing is, this particular piece of content was submitted by one of my affiliates.. and I then waited until the next day to share it..

There's no way they "found it" and it's every single day, every single day.

:(

[seovshate]

So on both of those pieces of articles i am outranked by the people harassing me LOL, Yet, this appears to be allowed? #*$! on your competitor and you get results!

[seovshate]

To me, it shows that i am blocking him and he is manually hating me.. How?

Because they are waiting until another competitor finds it and then doing the hate,, they would love to do to the hate to me me instead... because i posted it many hours before..

so basically this bad egg has created this hate in the entire niche now. You see? Compeators are "if I don't he will" and then he still screws them by reposting immediately.

This is going to kill the entire niche.

[londrum]

are you paying your affiliates to provide articles? maybe they are just submitting them to multiple people to get paid more than once

[thecoalman]

What do you mean by registered work?

I'm not a lawyer and I can only speak to my understanding of US law, how this would apply to you depends. Copyright is granted upon creation. Registration is not required and few people do it because there is fees, paperwork etc.

If you want to sue for infringement in any case you will first need to register the work and proving damages can be difficult. Even if you win the case you can come away with peanuts.

However if you register the work before infringement occurs you can collect statutory damages and attorney fees. If you register a work before you publish it with the expectation it will be stolen you are setting a grenade for them to steal.

[seovshate]

I have found the main infringing ip address. I usually would require it to login to Facebook but they attacked my Facebook app and it's broken still..

So I just blocked him, he's using Charter Communicatoins now. It just switches...

I feel that I should maybe do something else with the ips? Like here's my "great idea"..

Is it illegal for me to start calling this guy Mr. 5 seconds too late? And then for his IP, instead of blocking him I'm going to put him into my soft block zone and keep this message popping up everywhere and then start sharing social media posts saying stuff like "Are you 5 seconds too late? Don't be! Like my page and xxxx..."

I really don't know what else to do other than attack his mind like he appears to be trying to do to me? This is crappy...

There appears to be additional users slamming the site maybe to hide the real traffic? I don't know..

It ended up being the 'Colton Banks' username that was just created.

[seovshate]

Or maybe I should just straight say exactly what's happening... i mean.. what are you going to do... take me to court? See you there!

[seovshate]

Update: I am working on Fingerprints and using trusted event handlers... I think going down this rabbit hole I have found a new solution that should make things even harder, which in return should make the hate even worse.

Aparently this is "SEO 2024!" and there is "Nothing I Can Do" but focus on making content and make them focus on getting past me, apparently.

[seovshate]

Update: Last night I was contacted again by this person who I am pretty sure are part of these people..

They message or text me everytime they either think:

#1. Thye are winning
#2. They are loosing

There is two people involved both out of the state of Florida. I am 100% positive these are the same people. Is that not a crime in itself to attempt to lure somebody to a rural home because of some medical conditions I have? That is how they found me through a medical group on Facebook and now are basically trying to pull information from me as to where I am.

The text basically started off:

"Where are you?"

And then now like for the third time, he "has a friend who wants to meet me" "and is the same age as me" and so many things.

What do I do here? I'm leaving this text here for self-defense because if I see these people (i have doxed them and I know what they look like), that will be considered a threat.

[seovshate]

There is also a group of Indians that also do the same thing.. I'm not sure if they are connected to these individuals..

They are out of the state of Florida (all of them) and their home is in Naples, Florida and it last sold for 80 million dollars.

That's the people who want to "help me" and "meet me off grid"

[ClosedForLunch]

This thread is like an opening chapter of a mystery thriller

[londrum]

if i was in your shoes i'd just forget the website and do something else, it's not worth the years of hassle and stress

[seovshate]

And like clock work,, I am being ddosed again.. My Cloudflare has 28,000 blocked requests in the past 30 minutes but something is still messing my server up and my CPU usage is stuck at 100%.

"if i was in your shoes i'd just forget the website and do something else, it's not worth the years of hassle and stress"

I am trying to maybe start something new.. It seems kindove strange for me to walk away to a bully basically. It's one thing to walk away with respect like "Ok, you earned it. Good job! Etc.", so I battle with that too.

[seovshate]

Wow, this time he messed up again.. it's from his Home ISP.

This is the IP I blocked Mid November... This is the Facebook profile that was the fake real estate agent..

I basically blocked 172.58.124.0/22 in Cloudflare... Well the 38,000 requests is from that range and it's probably going to cost them a lot of bandwidth.

I don't understand why I can't do anything about this.

[tangor]

I don't understand why I can't do anything about this.

Evil has no morals, and when/if defeated in the short term just moves on to annoy someone else.

IF YOU HAVE positively identified the miscreants it is time to contact a criminal attorney, the police, and bring charges of theft and conversion of intellectual property (provided you ARE 100% the creator of such content).

Then again, you admit to creating these pages from the work of others via some special method you developed clipping/aggregating info from the web nobody else has---and these folks are ripping off your ripped off work. They do it because they are lazy and want to make money. You do it because you are clever and want to make money, and now ticked off that someone is skimming your stuff.

Truly creative copyrightable material CAN BE PROTECTED... anything else is a bit more problematic.

Meanwhile, collect this thread, create some characters/motives, add the tech/science to bamboozle the layperson, hire an editor, locate a publisher, then give James Patterson a run for his money.

[seovshate]

"Evil has no morals, and when/if defeated in the short term just moves on to annoy someone else."

That's for sure..

"IF YOU HAVE positively identified the miscreants it is time to contact a criminal attorney, the police, and bring charges of theft and conversion of intellectual property (provided you ARE 100% the creator of such content)."

If you know one that can "listen" for like a hour before they really can understand what is happening... please let me know. If anybody knows a lawyer, point them here..

"Then again, you admit to creating these pages from the work of others via some special method you developed clipping/aggregating info from the web nobody else has---and these folks are ripping off your ripped off work. They do it because they are lazy and want to make money. You do it because you are clever and want to make money, and now ticked off that someone is skimming your stuff."

That's for sure too! It's not my only way I find content, but one of them and people are for sure lazy. They can also find this content and I've seen them,.. but it's more for like a few days maximum... and then get extremely mad like "WHy am I not rankings! It's been 4 days!" type thing..

"Truly creative copyrightable material CAN BE PROTECTED... anything else is a bit more problematic."

Ya :(

"Meanwhile, collect this thread, create some characters/motives, add the tech/science to bamboozle the layperson, hire an editor, locate a publisher, then give James Patterson a run for his money."

That's my plan. I've been thinking about it and it appears they are doing tons of work off my back.. so you know what? Get ready to work really hard.. their justification was

"I just post it first"

Well now get ready for me to focus on "posting it first" and make sure you have nothing of value to add to anything.

Let this battle around in their mind..

Then I got contacted by a 3rd "harasser" and I guess he forgot that I already know the girl and her last name... trying to connect me with this dude wit the same last name as her... I'm pretty sure these are husband and wife of my attackers :(

By working even harder and not focusing on them seems to make them even madder.

Here's to it.

[seovshate]

They use the Female to flirt with me and district me etc. I already knew it and stopped a while ago and this last name guy basically proves it.. these people suck.

[tangor]

If you know one that can "listen" for like a hour before they really can understand what is happening... please let me know. If anybody knows a lawyer, point them here..

That will never happen. We don't give legal advice, much less recommend lawyers!

As for that "hour" you want to explain things, be aware the lawyer will likely charge you just to listen.

For legal representation you will have to make the effort to find the right person. One way to narrow the field is look for attorneys who deal specifically in Intellectual Property and Copyright.

[blend27]

-- then give James Patterson a run for his money --

or Sam Esmail for that matter...Mr. Robo....

:)

[seovshate]

"That will never happen. We don't give legal advice, much less recommend lawyers!"

I guess not? I thought of you as the authority in Weastmers and Webmaster Discussions.. Maybe this is just new? But to me, your response indicates that basically, this is "SEO" in 2024...

Everybody reverts back to "this is not your content etc", but that's how the world works..

You're basically saying that "if you work on the internet, your work is worthless and 1 day a spammer will come and there is nothing you can do about. Invest in ANYTHING but online"

I'm not sure who those people are...

I've been pushing harder and have gotten them to back off somewhat.. They are now instead of copying me actually looking for content.. this is great to me and I notice that when they do look for content they are not able to post on 3 - 5 websites in a hour.. Then are posting like a regular person almost!

I can't wait to see the state of the internet in a few years!

[seovshate]

Even this forum is subject to the exact same thing..

Any post somebody does, take the thread / idea.. Throw the text in a spinner (we call it AI these days and apparently if you call text spinners AI it's OK) and then reblog about it...

It's not your idea or content. Somebody got an idea from your website and decided to blog about it too..

Then they decide to make 10 websites and are "only getting ideas from your website" therefore you can't do anything..

[seovshate]

Now throw in a few of those websites scraping so quickly, that they are taking your post from your forum post, and changing their post time to be 10 minutes before you..

You will say "That's my content!" and they will say "I just blogged about a subject, blogging about the subject is not yours!"

That's basically what is happening to me......

[seovshate]

You'll say "I would file a complaint and do this or that"...

Well you will know what's happening (its your website) and that if somebody posts a thread and it goes into pending and you wait a day to approve it and then every single day it happens in 10 minutes...

But How are you going to prove it?

For all you know, that same competitor is complaining to Google saying about how you're copying THEM because as far as the Google bot says - they did post it first.

You see the problem? Before this get's out of hand, the bad apples should be stopped.

[blend27]

RE: Funny humor...

Look/Start Here:

Filter Out Junk UAs(say anyone that comes to your site with Go-Http-Client or Java or any other junk), stick IP in Banned IP Table(SQL) and don't let them in for a while even if they try using proper UA
Filter out Older Browsers
Filter out Good Bots u allow by IP Tables and RDNS(let them in), and whitelisted IP Ranges
Filter out All Hosting Ranges
Filter out All those that are in Banned IP Table, from above(SQL).
Filter out All None USofA IPs
For all Browsers/Types you allow, make sure that Headers for those browsers match what they say they are.
Filter Out All IPs that are verified via API(many APIs exist at no or low cost(ProjectHoneyPot, webshare.io)) belonging to Proxies, Tor and such...

All of the above, named Preventive care, can de done programmatically and most of techniques are discussed in many many threads on WebmasterWorld. Cloudflare catches most abusive ones at the gate.

People who live in Gated Communities have a 6 foot tall wall, and entry point Gate with a Dude holding AK47.

But they also have alarms, cameras, apps on their phones and safe rooms for when s**t hits the fan(sure to late to scream it is ILLEGAL) - that is Curative care.

If at this point if all above fails...fight them on your turf. Get Creative! But it never ends and it never helps crying it is ILLEGAL either.

Your Site - Your Rules. Many legitimate Webmasters are so afraid to lose that extra one visitor or 5 without understanding it is not a real visitor, it is not funny.

At the same time many sites have leaky roof, missing windows and flood prone foundation...and sometimes no Doors.

[seovshate]

When you do stop them, don't worry worry. For a few days maybe a few weeks... that person who has been bullying you and basically stealing from you... will "become less of a dbag"..

What I mean by that is... they will still post every single thing you do... but they will wait 4 hours - 6 hours..

Because for some reason "if they wait a couple of hours" .. "that makes it OK"...

But don't worry, they are trying to figure out how to get through your new detection.. Unless after 3 years something is going to change....

[seovshate]

"Filter Out Junk UAs(say anyone that comes to your site with Go-Http-Client or Java or any other junk), stick IP in Banned IP Table(SQL) and don't let them in for a while even if they try using proper UA
Filter out Older Browsers
Filter out Good Bots u allow by IP Tables and RDNS(let them in), and whitelisted IP Ranges
Filter out All Hosting Ranges
Filter out All those that are in Banned IP Table, from above(SQL).
Filter out All None USofA IPs
For all Browsers/Types you allow, make sure that Headers for those browsers match what they say they are.
Filter Out All IPs that are verified via API(many APIs exist at no or low cost(ProjectHoneyPot, webshare.io)) belonging to Proxies, Tor and such..."

I get what you mean...

I believe i have an awesome spam detection.. I do all of what you said and tons more...

"Your Site - Your Rules. Many legitimate Webmasters are so afraid to lose that extra one visitor or 5 without understanding it is not a real visitor, it is not funny."

I block "regular" users all of the time.. That's how I just got them again..

What they did was create girl and makes sure she acts and comments on everything I do acting like a normal user,, but was not... Since blocking HER after the other guy a few weeks ago it's a ton better. I'm pretty sure they aren't doing it to be nice.. so that fake girl profile is an employee or another fake profile.

This just seems incredibly stupid, like if this was real life you know we would of been fighting and this issue would be resolved. People hiding behind a monitor screen apparently makes them have 0 morals.

[seovshate]

"Since blocking HER after the other guy a few weeks ago it's a ton better"

To clarify, I blocked the t-mobile user a few weeks ago and her on Saturday.

On Monday, I posted 2 best pieces of content ever and for the first time in 2 months.. the guy wasn't able to copy me and do that thing..

It appears he is blocked again and manually looking himself and not able to post on all of the blogs and more. It's good, but for how long?

[seovshate]

"But it never ends and it never helps crying it is ILLEGAL either.".

Ain't nobody crying here... I guess you don't see the end goal here?

I'm looking for a way to make this stop...

There's no reason to make 10+ copies of everything I do and violate the rules to play the game...

I find it incredible that every "webmaster" thinks this is "ok"...

Aparently it's OK for everybody to do.. except Google! How Dare google try to use "AI " and show your work without your consent, while sending you tons of free traffic..

The world has lost their mind.