Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It appears, that as of this morning one of our sites is incurring a ~90+ penalty for two sections of the site (eg. widget.com/blue and widget.com/red are affected while widget.com/overview is not). Our site has five sections. I am still trying if the rest of the site is affected.
After the initial analysis it appears that some pages that used to rank #1 in G SERPs are appearing on page 10. The site is static (no user generated content) and referential in nature, 3 years old, with minimal SEO (page names in URLs and H1s only). It looks clean and the code is simple and light.
The content is unique and we cover ~25% of each page’s surface with Adsense. Let me note that we haven’t had any additions or updates to the site since 2/25/2009 – this (being stale?) comes to mind as the only other factor that may triggered any kind of adverse reaction on behalf of G. There is a couple dozen organic in-links, we got included into DMOZ (even though we did not apply – but were put into the right category) – there is a handful of outbound links, mostly to GOV and EDU authority sites (I checked them this morning and they all rank well). The root PR=4, the affected segments’s PR=3.
Needles to say, we were hit with approximately 70% traffic reduction – it hurts – we have two fathers, a student and two toddlers living (modestly) off this site (with that being said we have been VERY careful not to push the SEO envelope and we purposely kept it simple and clean) .
Now, we are trying to figure out why this happen and what steps we can take to alleviate the situation – as no action was taken on our part we did some looking around and it appears that approximately 45% a part of the site (the one that is suffering from penalty) was copied by a site with a name similar to hey-there-i-love-my-new-darn-widget.CO.CC (free subdomains) – our code was literary copied, our Urchin and Adsense code were replaced the thief’s values. The same was done with the footer and header. The theft is open, blatant and undisputable as even our internal tracking IDs were taken and republished (e.g., we have an internal reference ID CONT-MM-DD-YYYY placed at the end of the content segment). It appears that the site went live ~60 days ago.
We are about to fire a ‘cease and desist’ note to the owner (random xhad384y type hotmail address), the company that provides free CO.CC addresses and to file a complaint via G’s DMCA page.
I wanted to see if you guys can chime in with advice about:
1) How likely is that the penalty was ACTUALY triggered by the stolen duplicate content? I am still struggling to come up with an alternative explanation but this seems to be the only thing that comes to mind right now. At the same time, I am thinking that it’d be a way too easy method for taking competitor’s sites down. Any input is greatly appreciated.
2) Besides ‘cease/desist’ and DMCA – do we have any other recourse for this matter? They are running Adsense – would contacting the Adsense team help at all?
3) Is there anything else we need to look into as we search for the penalty trigger
4) Would contacting Google help – a reconsideration request? Any advice on how to do this and what to indicate.
Thanks,
Vedran
it’d be a way too easy method for taking competitor’s sites down
In this instance it was a joke script that spiders a page and then changes the language into slang and outputs a new page. This was not done maliciously, just someone playing on the net for a laugh. However Google got into the webspace they had put the joke files on and indexed the content. We got dropped.
We tracked the person down and explained what had happened - they were shocked and they took the pages down. When Google recrawled we popped back into the top 3.
