Hickacked website content

How would it affect your AdSense account?

[birdstuff]

In the Google forum, there is a thread where someone said his entire site had been downloaded and published. A couple of other people said the same thing had happened to them. Here is the thread:

[webmasterworld.com ]

Here is my question: What if someone replicated your site (including the AdSense code)? This could easily lead to all sorts of TOS violations and get you booted from AdSense. Could this possibly be the reason for some of those dreaded emails that we read about from time to time?

[Jenstar]

I think it would be pretty unlikely that someone would rip an entire site, but leave the original author's AdSense code on it. There is a chance that if the site has pelnty of content on a "profitable" keyword area, it could be stolen for the ripper to put his or her own AdSense code on it. A quick whois search, and a check to see who had the content up first should satisfy the AdSense Team, if someone ever fails to replace/remove the AdSense code.

When there is a violation or suspension, I believe they do give you the problem domain (in previous post, others have mentioned this so they knew which domain out of all of them running AdSense was the problem one).

[onfire]

I think it would be pretty unlikely that someone would rip an entire site, but leave the original author's Adsense code on it.

Well i had my site ripped completely, twice in one month last year, one site did not even bother changing any of the links at all, and another changed all the code and copyright stuff etc and pointed all the links for the products etc back to their domain.

What they hoped to gain by doing this i am not sure, only to make someone's life harder.

However this happened before i was showing Adsense luckily, but i hate to think what could have happened, my main concern was getting dropped from the rankings or being penalized or something, but i needn't of worried Florida took care of that ;)

Luckily i was able to get both sites shut down quickly, but their listings still appear in the SERPS, but they should soon disappear.

But if i had been running Adsense, then i would have notified the Adsense team straight away, but thinking about it they might have no option but to suspend the account until the dupe sites have been taken down, which means you loose anyway but at least you have an chance to continue with a clean slate once the storm has passed.

[Jenstar]

No, I unfortunately agree that having content stolen happens on a regular basis - I have sent out dozens of C&D's to copyright infringers. But none have left my own AdSense code on what they stole. AdSense is a more obvious and visible form of a monkey making link, and much easier to either change the publisher number or remove it entirely and repace it with something else.