Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Is there anything that can be done to stop this? Are we all just a copy-away from being blown out of the index?
1. Cause and effect. You found these sites by starting an investigation after you got banned. Don't jump to the conclusion that they caused you to be banned. In my experience, even if they are indexed the ranking of such sites is usually marginal.
2. From what I can tell you are talking about people copying your entire site. That's not really what a scraper is.
3. If they've taken your content in its entirety, file a DMCA complaint with Google.
Got you covered dude, we just went through this and emerged victorious numerous times. I had 40 sites removed from Google's index last week.
First, forget submitting to Google’s “report spam” link, it’s a joke, they have not acted to any of about 100 submissions we made the last 2 years. So we adapted our strategy. There is a way to make Google act, that we used successfully.
Instead, you should fax Google a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) Notice, using their instructions EXACTLY at
[google.com...]
Then in about a week or so, they will remove the site from their index. They have removed a number of sites we sent them. It’s easy to prove you are the owner of the content in 3 ways, that we use:
1)Your site is trademarked and/or registered in Library Of Congress
2)Your site domain name is a lot older than the scum wad lose moron scraper site
3)Your site has old screen shots of it in Archive.org Internet way back machine, while the scamming scraper site has no entries at all.
Also, at the same time, send a DMCA to the web host of the scraper site, about 75% of the time, the web host will remove the site. Forget the webmaster they will never respond, and often the email address is a bogus one anyway, or they hide behind Domain By Proxy firms.
Once the scraper site is shut down and PAGE NOT FOUND, you must IMMEDIATELY DO THIS:
Go to Google’s AUTOMATED URGENT DEAD LINK REMOVAL TOOL, which crawls the dead site immediately as soon as you submit it. You must act immediately, before the scammer has a chance to find a new web host a day or 2 later.
The Google tool is here:
You’ll need a Google login tool to use it. Once you submit the dead page to this “Urgent Removal Request” tool, they show you online pending, or completed. Takes about 2 days and they email you when the site has been removed.
The beauty of this strategy, is that Google will not allow that URL back in the index after the tool removes it, for 6 months! Even if they re-submit, they are out in the cold for 6 months.
That my friend, is how you screw the screwers at their own game.
Make sure if you ever contact anyone (such as them or their host) via email create an address such as:
legaldepartment@yoursitename.com
Really gets things moving fast also.
A very nice post. It works in my experience except I never thought about hitting up the removal tool. That is a nice kick in the nuts right there:)
abuse@example.com
I then tell them to please forward to their legal counsel.
It's important to remember, that according to law, in order for the web host to be protected, and for them to be able to remove the offendin site, you must give astatement tot he fact that you own the information, and under penalty of perjury....you are telling the triuth....
And most require a signature which I have as a gif image, or some allow an electronic signature by using a slash in front and after your name to signify it.
That whole format above is required by web hosts, and if you don't do it that way, they will ignore your request.
The other 10% of the sites might respond telling you their DMCA process, maybe you have to send it to anothe remail address, or they may require you to fax the DMCA notice.
Either way I like to use screen shots showing how they copied from our site word for word. Most cases they are shut down iwthin a day or 2.
you must give a statement to the fact that you own the information, and under penalty of perjury.... you are telling the truth
This is playing in the big leagues. Before swearing to this, I'd recommend thinking through carefully that you DID originate the content on your site and that you're not embellishing the degree of infringement involved.
Don't be intimidated by the language and the perjury statement, it's just required by DMCA laws so that the web host has a justification to shut the web site down, and still be protected from their customer suing them.
If they are not running AdSense, you have to do DMCA letters. I usually do Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
What planet is that goofball Semel at Yahoo from?
When I did a google search allinurl:example.com on my site 2 weeks ago, there were 69,000 scraper sites pointing to our site, looking like search engines, when all they really doing is grabbing the top dozen advertisers for that keyword from Yahoo/Overture, and displaying them, probably clicking a few every day.
So I went into Overture and cutoff all our keywords there for now.
Turns out these scraper sites are dynamic real time updated, and they all stopped showing our site on their bogus "SERP" once we shut off the keywords in Overture/Yahoo.
Within 2 days, Google index dropped down to 34,000 scraper sites pointing to us, and even less in the ensuing days.
The problem with Yahoo's organic search engine is we cannot find a way to submit urls to remove.
The pay per click Yahoo/Overture has no way for you to prevent your ads from showing up on "content network" partners like Google does, so you are screwed, you have to turn them all off, or leave them all on.
MSN Adcenter only receives traffic from their own MSN owned sites, so the traffic should be a lot more honest there. But MSN adcenter just came out of beta and so there is no worry yet about click fraud there, but there is no way we know of to shut down scammer URLs out of the regular MSN search engine.
