HUGE commercial site stole my pages and they rank 1st and I vanished

They copied about 4 of my best ranked pages.

[ferfer]

About 2 years later from uploading some pages, I realized that those pages were not attracting SE traffic anymore, I test in google to search for some kw combinations that used to trigger my pages in good positions...

I found the the same pages of mine, with the same tittle, but in a HUGE commercial site domain, it seems that they hired a SEO that copied pages from well ranked sites and posted them in their site, now I am very upset with google, because My pages were 2 years before in a site with about 100 real inbound links from sites and indexes like dmoz, the thief is in a HUGE domain with a very important commercial reputation and more pagerank than mine, but that is all to flag their pages as ORIGINAL and mines as COPIES? in the current searches they are at top and my domain is gone, for pages not copied by them I am ranked as usual!

So what's going on? if a site with more pagerank than other copies pages from little sites It get the ranking and drop the original page from Google?!?

I am very dissapointed with Google algo for duplicate pages, this is opening the path for big content thieves!

[asinah]

I faced the same problem but I reported the websites that did it with me. As far as I saw last week their domain was removed from the G index.

Get in contact with google I would suggest.

[geebee2]

May not be practical, but can you not sue said site for breach of copyright?

[cyberprosper]

Yeah, if they are big, sue them. It will be worth money.

DMCA letters to web hosts work very well to get sites taken down quickly.

[IITian]

It is likely that the company didn't know. Write a polite letter to their legal dept. possibly showing them some proof (eg point to www.archive.org's version of the page in question) and ask them to remove the material within a week or so.

[idoc]

I have been seeing more of this too. I always saw the small time home operators that steal content and point it at affiliate tracking URL's. Now too it looks like large companies with high PR and endless ad budgets are doing this. I don't see affiliate tracking in the URL's unless they are doing it completely server side from the referring domain URL or something. They are cloaking the pages, but are leaving tracks in serps of pages indexed by google. I don't know if they have more lawyers than sense or what their problems are. My question is does google have a specific form or preferred method to report this? They don't evidently care about the cloaked pages because the top serps are full of them.

As far as legal recourse... of course copyright belongs to the owner of the material. Which in all practicality means nothing once you get into the legal system. File against the behemoth in your local county, watch it get removed to federal court and suddenly you are spending $400 an hour to be "right" and the behemoth is getting their moneys worth from their legal department.