Strange results appearing in Google Alerts for my site

[chazeo]

As many have done, I set-up Google alerts for a few of my websites and every couple days I get an alert that mentions an article/page of my site. The Google alerts reads as follows:

PAGE/POST TITLE
Body copy/text... mysite.com...

When I click on the link, the page it takes me to is one of those meaningless urls with lots of subdomains (http://one.meaningless.domainwords.com/my_page_title.html).

When I visit the page it is a scraper site with adwords ads and all the ads seem to be based on my POST TITLE as the query. However, there's no actual link to or mention of my site whatsoever. Could someone explain what this is, how it could affect me, and what I can do to defend against it.

Thanks!

[bwnbwn]

Is the google alert is set up for the domain name, do this search
domain name.com then title to the article I think you will find the scraper is using your domain name then doing a 302 to the adwords landing page.

The search results most likely will show your site domain name in the description of the url.

If the above is true then Report them google for Violation of policy be sure and show all necessary information to allow the Googler to see the exact path to the adwords page.

Get the domain name do a whois get all necessary information to locate the party and or hosting company of the offending domain and proceed to see if you can communicate with either party to get this stopped.

[chazeo]

When I do a search for "example.com post title" I don't get any results in google. Am I doing the proposed search correctly?

Again, the page that is sent to me in the Google alert has no reference on the page I can see to my site.

[edited by: tedster at 3:53 am (utc) on April 16, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[chazeo]

after some back and forth emails it was determined that this guy has a slew of sites that seem to scrape domain names and pages/posts in an effort to rank pages above yours in domain name searches.

Does anyone have any ideas how to combat this for a non-trademarked, personal site that doesn't generate income (meaning there are no financial loses at present other than reputation)?

Thanks!

[tedster]

When I do a search for "example.com post title" I don't get any results in google.

Unless your domain name actually appears in text on the page, that may not be the right search. I'd try both [site:example.com post title] and [site:example.com "post title"]

In the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page, you can find the link to this thread:

Scraped or Stolen Content: What To Do First [webmasterworld.com]