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Linked on competitor's search results page.

A good thing or bad?

         

Broadway

6:09 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



My content-based website ranks well for multiple key words. The site has 1000+ backlinks.

In it's efforts to do better in the SERP's a commercial site has set up several "fake search engine results pages" for several keywords. Each of these pages lists probably 20 sites and their descriptions. This site is just spamming the SERPs in hopes of getting a page ranked decently. They offer no fresh content, the only content is the ripped off site descriptions. They have about 60 of these fake pages that contain a link to my site.

The Google PR these fake search results pages is zero (however this may be because they are in the Google sandbox for new pages). When I search the SERP rankings I don't find these fake pages in the top 50 or so.

I happen to sell this commercial website advertising space. How should I look at their activity. Should I be insulted because they have ripped of my content as a part of their efforts to spam the SERPs or should I look at this as an extra 50 links pointing to my site and therefore a benefit?

Longhaired Genius

6:26 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Personally, I would not link to a site that did this.

ken_b

7:34 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I don't think it's much of a benefit, but I don't think it does much harm either, as long as you don't link back of course.

I do occasionally actully see a referal from pages like that, which always kind of surprizes me when it happens.

Basically, I'd say just going on about building your own site and ignoring these things is a better use of time and energy.

WebFusion

9:26 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I happen to sell this commercial website advertising space.

Just don;t give them a direct link, i.e. use a redirect and forbid google from crawling/following the link. If it's true "advertising", then they won;t care. If it's a text link purchased for ranking purposes, why would you help a competitor?

Broadway

12:02 am on Nov 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Just an update.

This site is now no longer listed in Google. They have been banished. Period.

I looked at Yahoo.com to see what pages for this site were listed there. All of the fake scraped results pages are now 404 "page cannot be found" pages. Evidently this webmaster has removed all the fake SERP pages in an effort to get back into Google. I hope it takes a long time.

Score one for the good guys.

Spine

9:30 pm on Nov 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



How do you know they are banished? Not showing up for their own URL?