Illegal Blogspot Copies Rank Above the Original After Panda

[chrisv1963]

I was checking Google rankings for 5 articles this morning. 4 of them dropped about 10 positions. Nothing special here because this is what I have seen for more pages after Panda. The 5th article however was nowhere to be found in the serps.

I did searches with snippets of the 5th article (published in 2006 according to Internet Archive) and found 3 results for the article. Two illegal copies on Blogspot from 2009 and January 2011 ranking above me and finally my own page on the 3rd position.

I did the same with the other 3 articles. Result: no copies found.

My conclusion is that Panda is punishing websites because content has been stolen. They should punish the thief, not the owner!

Internet Archive can show clearly who the owner of the content is. Why can't Google's "great" Panda algo do the same?

[deadsea]

I see Blogspot coming up over and over again in the center of the stolen content.

My theory is that Blogspot (owned by Google) is marked by the human reviewers as an amazing site that can do no wrong. Under this designation it is the defacto winner in content ownership questions. Any site that has its content republished on Blogspot is marked as a scraper site. Because it couldn't possibly be Blogspot that is the scraper site.

If I were blackhat, I would consider scraping all my competitors articles and posting them to a blogspot blog. Not to rank myself, but to get their site pandalized.

Google should reclassify Blogspot.com so that the entire domain doesn't have the golden child status. It should properly be treated as if each subdomain is a separate site. Which each subdomain is.

[netmeg]

I dunno; I have sites that have a *ton* of weird looking backlinks from blogspot blogs, and I'm pretty sure most if not all of those links have been deprecated. I don't think they get any special juice just by virtue of being Blogger.

[indyank]

Google is making use of their blogger platform in some way or other for this panda update.Whenever you do a search for a sentence from any affected page on an information site, you will find a minimum of one scraped page from blogger platform, copying your entire stuff word by word.

They could either rank higher or lower, but what is important is they add to the duplicate content and this is all they want to demote your page and the entire information site.

If the scraped content is on a forum like yahoo answers or other popular forums, 99% of the times google will rank them higher for the sentence being searched.

But you will not find these sites around when you try to retrieve your page in google search for the keyword it ranks for.However, these copycats seem to be a good excuse for google to demote your page for its keywords, as the page is no longer unique.

Panda has made it more simple to hurt competition. And the serps are getting ridiculously bad in the past few days.I am now expecting Mr.Amit or Mr.Cutts to make a statement anytime that they have now implemented panda for the "longtail of those low quality pages" and their tests proved that it is working exactly how they intended.

[walkman]

Blogspot, like Youtube, has gotten a major boost this update.

[Tashi]

Exactly, I see a lot of Blogspot blogs ranking high with copied content and often above the original source.
I wonder how Google rhymes Blogspot and quality, it's hard to find a Blogspot blog that isn't just spam.

[deadsea]

Google webmaster central has an official blog with webmaster help articles:
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
Clearly all of blogspot is high content like this.

[falsepositive]

Not only that, the scrapers are now simply showing snippets and short excerpts, and they are all ranking above my content. I have DMCA'd so many already but new ones keep popping back up. All the new ones have snippets and my copyright label on the site (which I've included in my feed). So it's quite funny to see these all rank ahead of all the original content. Google is damn broken if they think these examples represent a great user experience.

Ironically, I am now getting a lot of scraper referral traffic. Funny! It won't be long before my traffic will consist of referrals from scrapers rather than search traffic at this point.

Very sad that Google's moves have pretty much destroyed it for many small business owners. I have clamped down on any form of content sharing. There have been many non-profit online magazines that would contact me and ask permission to reprint my content. I used to be happy about letting others make use of my content to help their readers. Today I simply say "NO", because that's Google's legacy. I have become very selfish and protective about my content. And I have become suspicious of anyone using my content.

It is sad really, because it destroys some of the great things about the web. Forget information sharing in this day and age. It's every person for themselves.

I feel terrible about rejecting these requests but this is the new web.

[FranticFish]

The point was made in another thread that it is not in Google's interest to identify the originators of content.

Their priority is their searchers, not webmasters. As long as a searcher can find the content, then their needs (Google's customers) have been met.

It uses up Google's resources and makes them no money to attribute content to the correct source.

[walkman]

FranticFish, maybe so but there's a sense of fairness and Google will be 100 times worse than Microsoft ever was in people's minds.

[indyank]

The point was made in another thread that it is not in Google's interest to identify the originators of content.

Did Google make that point anywhere? Then why did they bring down Mahalo?

[enigma1]

I have DMCA'd so many already but new ones keep popping back up.

How much you would value your time and perhaps money, to start and follow up on a DMCA vs a $10 (approx) a scraper needs to spend, to register yet another domain.

Their priority is their searchers, not webmasters. As long as a searcher can find the contentt, then their needs (Google's customers) have been met

What content, any content? you know the mentality of having poor organic results listed first, in order to boost ad related clicks generating revenue may backfire.

[FranticFish]

Did Google make that point anywhere?

It's their actions that matter to me, not what they do - or don't - say.

They can take down Mahalo; they can take down big sites and networks to set examples. But it's easy to take down one huge visible site.

They are a business and do things that benefit their bottom line. Where is the direct business benefit in attributing content to the correct people?

Maybe I'm being cynical, but however much they may SAY they care, I personally doubt that this is a priority for them because it will not increase revenue and it will take large amount of resources to implement.

[chrisv1963]

Google webmaster central has an official blog with webmaster help articles:
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
Clearly all of blogspot is high content like this.

High quality content on blogspot is an exception. Last month I submitted more than 50 DMCA's for blogspot posts with low quality content (parts/snippets copied from articles on my websites) and image hotlinking.

When you submit a DMCA, blogspot removes the violating post, even when it is clear that the entire blog is junk, spam and hotlinking. Why don't they ban the blogs of spammers? Are they blind or do they want to support spammers to make sure that they keep adding pages to this Google property?

Blogspot is the biggest collection of junk and spam ever. Google should be proud of this "property" ...

[enigma1]

Why don't they ban the blogs of spammers?

I am just guessing, its because if they did, they won't "rank" very well.

[FranticFish]

Here we go - Google move the location of 'report copyright infringement' - clearly a company that cares very much about correctly attributing content: [webmasterworld.com...]