Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
What appears to have happened is someone has taken Matts content (word for word) and provided this as Cloaked pages to Googlebot.
Google considers the link text to be (as important)¦(more important)¦(who knows?) as the page text. darkseoteam may have used the snippet as their link text, rather than cloaking. I also suspect that they may not have been concious of what would happen, but were practising to try to see the workings of part of the current algo, exactly as their page suggests.
Presumably MC will have the luxury of having it all personally sorted out for him!
You can take almost any sentence from Matts Blog and get the entries to appear.
It looks like Cloaking - It might not be for sure - but looks like it.
I was more excited when I first found it as I thought it may have been brought down due to Canonical url problems.
It is however a cloaking, original content problem instead. :/
What does Dayo_UK today findings about hijacking our fellow member Matt Cutts contents tells us?
Now we can see that Google´s webmaster guidelines contains incorrect information to webmasters.
[google.com...]
Here is what Google wrote on the said url:
-----------------------------------
Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.
Fact:
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design.
------------------------------------------
Now how should we believe that anymore?
Today we know that a competitor actually can kill your site. A competitor can get your site to either lose its ranking on the serps, or just get it to drop entirely from the index.
First he/she needs to steal your contents. Upload it to any domain. And Googlebot shall do the rest of the dirty job.
And once again. I´m not Anti-Google. I really love that engine. But I feel also really sad to see the decline of Google.
I hope that our friends at the plex listen, learn and fix all those "bugs". And I wish them God speed in their endeavors!
What's not to love? :)
Out site was completely ripped off by one of our competitors and we got dropped from Google because of it, and the only explaination is because they have an older domain name than us. It is really annoying, and what is even more annoying is that I have contacted Google three or four times over a 6 month period and heard zilch back from them.
And it is nothing to do with tactics, we dont practice any dodgy stuff on our sites.
They are now conducting a duplicate content filter test.
Payback can be a hoot.
[edited by: theBear at 3:59 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2005]
In similar fashion, 302 and non-www problems can be "shown" to GoogleGuy.
[edited by: lawman at 9:19 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2005]
This morning it was dozens of listing pages from 800,000 odd results. Not sure what that means other than they are still fiddling about with how they list results and maybe continuing to add pages to the index...
>>...since writing original content will not stop the scrapers from stealing your content (as it is in my case), and G is not able to tell (or as matter of fact not willing to admit) that they are powerless to stop it, this only means one thing: time to join the darkside - its really the only way that works. unless someone can tell me otherwise. but, and again, I highly doubt it. <<
Well...I´m gonna tell you otherwise ;-)
First of all we are publishers/webmasters not thieves stealing other people hard work and properties.
Nothing on this earth, not even a top ranking on Google´s serps, should be allowed to destroy our ethics and decent conducts.
One thing is to "overoptimize" pages, sitewide linking, cross link several domains etc..
Something entirely different is to steal other fellow publishers/webmasters contents.
Having said that, I really understand your frustration as decent publisher witnessing Google unable to fix its problems, which you and other kind fellow members are suffering of.
There's a scraper guy out there (with a snippet of my content) who comes up first position in MSN for one of my key phrases. He has obviously been banned from Google recently because I can't find him in Google anymore.
However, today he still has Adsense on his site. So my point is that even though Google knows he is a bad bad boy, they still let him use Adsense on MSN. So Google bad boy too!
Okay - back to work now...
I emphasize: the simple fact is that G can not tell who the owner of the content is and currently is favoring the scrapers. it is really that simple. shall I stay idle and simply let this happen? will you? what type of an effect does this have on people that want to create useful content for the web? you are hereby a witness.
while I don't condone the ethics the scrapers may apply, it now seems that stealing content is being rewarded by Google, and by the way of inaction reaffirming the belief that this is the way of the future. since we humans, rely on rewards to spawn and repeat our deeds, we shall look to the authority for the actions that are likely produce them. the authority tells us stealing will bear fruit, we have great respect for the authority - it does no evil. we shall steal.
" time to join the darkside - its really the only way that works."
What will you do when it stops working and you're persona non grata with Google?
move on to a new domain perhaps?
I'm not sure the correct term would be persona non grata, perhaps, site non grata.
" time to join the darkside - its really the only way that works."What will you do when it stops working and you're persona non grata with Google?
the real question here that you should ask is: "what if it does NOT stop working, what will YOU do?"
Not that I condone going to the "darkside", but I had to answer this question. They'll do what every other site scraper/black hat SEO does when they're caught by Google. They'll take 10 minutes, scrape somebody's else content, start a new site on a clean IP address and within a day or two be back at the top of the rankings! ;-)
I honestly don't expect Google to fix this problem anytime soon, so I don't think the Black Hats are in any danger of becoming personal non grata, unlike us White Hats who follow the rules. As for me I'm concentrating on non-Google related marketing and it's paying off. Heck my Yahoo traffic has doubled in the past week. Probably because people are getting fed up with the garbage Google is spewing for some keywords and moving on to a new search engine. I know I am!
-- T
[edited by: lawman at 9:25 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2005]
[edit reason] TOS 26 [/edit]
