Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
To those of you who think its OK to steal content - I would rate a drug up'ed junky who robs a bank more ethical than a webmaster who steals content. The junky has a uncontrollable need because of his problem - with a webmaster its just simple greed, theft, dishonesty etc etc - and yes life turns on people like this - they die misrable because eventually the dishonest behavior catches up with them.
Gotta be impossible, people give Google too much credit as if they are omnipotent. We have seperate servers, seperate everything actually. Part of the buyout agreement was that we would keep all the files hosted on his server peremnetly so that google wouldnt make that conclusion (networked sites). Even tried to leave the whois info as intact as possible. The only changes we made was to add our link to all pages of the site back to our parent site, which as usual killed the parent site...
>>But I’m still wondering since I rarely deal with Google support are the stolen pages removed if the DMCA complaint is filed directly with Google? <<
Some say yes.. other say no ;-)
[webmasterworld.com...]
Personally I think finding, reporting, prosecuting, etc, content thieves should be at the top of anybody's list these days.
True, but I got a bead on a hacker that can just rip out their site - and their entire livelyhood.
It's faster and comes with a bit of poetic justice.
Sort of a protection service from content thieves that could handle it all for the busy webmaster.
I am flummoxed... The site knocked back is getting hit hard by Googlebot today...but the last cache for the index page says the 19th September... perhaps things will sort themselves out in the coming days or weeks...
Sure do miss those extra 1,000+ visitors a day!
I don't have aff links and adsense appearing on the same pages.
The pages that ranked (each site had an indent) did not have any aff links or adsense on them.
True - our 'drop' was minimal (about 10 spots down + we lost our indents for our main keywords)... but it is the biggest downward movement ever for us.
For other phrases we've dissapeared - and these pages had adsense / NO affiliate for the subject.
As it only happened to the 2 sites we added adsense to and updated our affiliate content on - I can't help thinking one or both these things are part of why its happened.
Perhaps, adsense drew attention to these sites - but I'm leaning to the dupe content theory... adding that the effect of dupe content on one section of our sites has caused the other sections to lose ranking.
True, but I got a bead on a hacker that can just rip out their site - and their entire livelyhood.
This would be illegal and actionable, I would entirely expect a content theif to take you to court and win. How ironic.
In other words if they can't do a decent job of making that choice why not just leave it all in there and have complete (and in most cases better) SERPs.
The reason why this would never happen is very simple. People with high ranking sites would just make duplicates of their own pages and have all their duplicate listings go on forever blocking out anyone else from the search results.
If you demote people who do that, then you are back to square one. You can't just have them present duplicate data as-is because it would be significantly abused.
I'm not an SEO or HTML expert; far from it, but I've taken what I learned at WebmasterWorld and applied it fairly consistently with excellent results -- until now.
Now, I've gone from over 7,000 visitors per day to just over 3,000 - and my affiliate revenue has gone down the toilet.
I've read this thread, trying to figure out this stuff about duplicate content penalties etc. And I've done the &filter=0 thing on my site - and, yep, it's showing me right at the top when I do that, and right out of sight on many, many pages without it.
Ironically, although lots of my original content pages have hit the dumper, one page that still ranks well is one of a small proportion that I copied with permission from a free reprint group.
One possibility occurred to me...a couple of months ago, I added a php based affiliate product catalog to my site. I placed this in its own directory, linking to it from my home page and relevant places within my site. This brought my page count up in Google from about 350 pages to about 1,800 pages - but, of course, the 1500 extra pages were exact reproductions of the affiliate site. I hadn't considered this impact when I installed it, nor did I promote it heavily - it was more a service to readers than anything else. Now I'm wondering...could it be this catalog that has tripped the update filter?
From Google's perspective, I guess, I'm now featuring predominantly copied pages, and I've had a huge increase in pages in a very short time period. Makes me look bad.
I thought this experience might help us all to sort out the scope of this filter or penalty. And my question is: can I recover my respectability by dumping this catalog post-haste?
We have hundreds of thousands of pages from world news articles to info pages on movies, book, etc.
We don't get up to anything shifty with SEO, have thousands of inbound links (mostly direct to articles)in fact we are even a Google News source site. Until last week on the main page about 20 times a day.
However, whatever they have done has ripped our traffic down to our daily repeat visitors. I think currently we are getting next to nothing from Google Search or news. I also noticed our peers have all seen traffic drop like a stone.
So I would not change anything. I know I won't be, I will eat my hat if it stays like this...might have to as will be short of cash :-)
I will be interested to see what anyone from Google has to say about all this.
I did note a small change Sunday morning with another page of results showing on a certain search...so I think still things afoot. Also the fact that some questionable sites that went a while ago are back makes me think this is almost like a regressive change. I noted one of our peers who changed domains a year or so ago now comes up under their old domain, clearly how they used to be listed at that time and incorrect.
If it does stay till end of the week then I will contact adsense and ask them about it...
James
I don't know what to do. My adsense income tanked big time. The only major change I saw was that the number of results when searching the name of our site increased from 18,000 to 84,000. Site is totally white hat (I don't even use H1 and all; just develop good content).
There are tons of systems out there that can do a decent job of completely ripping off a site.
Several have been mentioned in other threads, it doesn't take a lot of effort to find them.
In fact if some of these have been turned on your site you can have your own form of fun.
Wish to ask you whether you have noticed since 22nd September 2005 that your front page (homepage) or any other of your product pages are represented on the serps by one of your affiliates referral link(s)?
Thanks!
I really did think that it was as bad as it would get, but no. It's getting worse.
On Sunday, for the first time ever, the number of people coming from bookmarks exceeded the Google-supplied people. Jeez.
Re: Affected sites since 22nd Sept 2005
We observe changes, suggest and guess in good faith. That's all what we can do.
But we need to be open minded too during any opdate, and look for all possibilities that might have caused a site to drop.
Fellow members have been focusing mostly on the duplicate (stolen content) issue. Fair enough .. power to you. But aren´t there other factors that we really need to look at?
- How about duplicates within your own site of your own making (in good faith of course)?
- How about the presence of javascript redirects?
- How about 100% frames pages with contents originated from other sites than yours?
- How about pages with "gibberish" texts?
- How about those "lovely" doorway pages?
- How about sitewide linking?
- How about...how about etc...
The reason I´m asking such question is because I could read between the lines of our good friends at the plex GoogleGuy and Matt recent posts that fighting spam is becoming more and more as priority No.1 for Google.
If we assume that the main priority of the current update is fighting spam, then we need to look at all factors that Google mark as such.
Therefore this post ;-)
[edited by: reseller at 6:51 am (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]
wouldn't it be better if google (GG or matt cutts)just exposed at least in general terms what they are trying to fight against so that all good-faith webmasters could try to follow such guidelines?
Just a thought in case GG or MC read this thread...
Just a thought in case GG or MC read this thread...
Of course the thread is read...
..but G only reply if it is in their interests to do so!
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