Text from my homepage in a competitor's Google description

I can't figure out why.

[Vec_One]

My site was sandboxed in September, so I've been examining it more closely than usual. I scraped some text off my homepage and searched for it in quotes. The exact same text appeared in all of the results for a number of pages belonging to a competitor. I couldn't find the text on the competitor's pages though.

The competitor's pages are all crude and identical. The only difference is the URLs. They all display AdSense and an affiliate banner. Google does not display a cache for any of them.

Does anyone know why my text would show in his/her results?

[Philosopher]

Sure. It sounds as if your competitor scraped some or all of the content off of your site and placed on theirs. He/she then put a noarchive tag on the page so that Google wouldn't display the cached version of the page.

If you are not seeing the actual text used for the description when you visit the page in question, then your competitor is going a step further and serving Google 1 page and visitors a different page.

[WebFusion]

Sure...he's probably using one of those page-scraping pseudo-directory generators that are clogging up the serps with junk these days.

[jnmconsulting]

Generally it is because he has copied it onto his site. That could be the reason for the so called sand box effect. Is he listed in the SERPS higher than you site or the other way around? My guess is that he is below you in the SERPS, or was!

Just my Opinion..I'm sure others can offer better information.

[Vec_One]

Philosopher, that would certainly explain why he doesn't mind serving up the exact same crummy page for every URL. Google doesn't see it anyway. The worse his page looks, the more likely it is that visitors will click on the AdSense. I don't suppose you know of a way I could see the cloaked version of his page.

jnmconsulting, he isn't very successful in the SERPs. The sad thing is that I was doing very well before Sept 22. I was #1 for a lot of good searchterms. I guess that's why he picked on me.

I don't suppose anyone has any suggestions about how I can get out of this situation. What if I was to make some significant changes to my pages?

[Philosopher]

Well, if he is using User-Agent based cloaking, it's not too hard. You would use a type of browser that allows you to change the User-Agent to whatever you want it to be, you then use the same User-Agent that Google would issue when spidering a site.

Most likely, however, it is IP based cloaking which is VERY hard to get around as the cloaking is based on the IP address of the requesting machine.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that can be done. Sometimes a nice stern letter or email to the site owner letting them know they are in violation of copyright laws can do it. Sometimes, you can get Google to remove the offending site with a DMCA complaint.

It seems to come with the territory unfortunately. The better you do in the SERPs, the more likely it will happen.

[Vec_One]

I just did a little more checking and realized it's not just "him" - it's "them". A number of sites are scraping mine.

Here's one thing I don't get yet. The primary purpose of my site isn't about the money terms these guys are interested in. I just happen to have pages within the site that are (were) ranking well for these terms. The spammers seem to all copy my home page though. Why wouldn't they use the pages that are on-topic?

[siteseo]

Because spammers just wanna make money. Period. They don't care about relevance - they just wanna get that affiliate cookie set by any means necessary.

To respond to the initial post, G has started displaying ONLY a title tag and URL (no description) for pages that it detects duplicate content on. This is possibly a measure to prevent sites that steal (or pull-quote) content from other sites from ranking better than the original site in the serps.

[eddy22]

Hi,

When I see sites doing this, I report them to Yahoo and Google for 'Deceptive redirects'.

[google.com...]

[add.yahoo.com...]

And I am happy to say that although it takes time, action is generally taken.
One offending site which did this re-direct to my site has been removed from Google search.

eddy

[Vec_One]

Although I don't like the idea of submitting spam reports, it's probably the best thing to do. If the spammers aren't penalized, they will just do it more and more. :(

[tama]

Eddy, does Google or Yahoo do any investigative work at this? My site was completely copied by another site and when I wrote the owner he had the huevos to tell me I copied HIS site. I would like to report him to Google and Yahoo but I don't know if I can prove I had the design first. Do you know if Google/Yahoo has a way of knowing who was first or if they contact the duplicate site before removing?

[randallxski]

I don't know if I can prove I had the design first.

Try the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive site at www.archive.org [archive.org]. I don't know if it would stand up in court, but you may have some helpful evidence there.

[Vec_One]

I thought I'd take the friendly approach, at least to start, even though it's probably not the responsible thing to do.

I tried to contact four people. Two immediately fixed their sites. I think the WHOIS info for the other two is bogus. My only option is to file spam reports. Oh well, if they are so black hat that they have phony WHOIS info, I guess they shouldn't complain if they are treated accordingly.