Proxy Hijacked Sites Getting Ranked Higher than Original Source

[c41lum]

Hi all,

I'm shocked,

I have noticed over the past 3 weeks that my site keeps getting out ranked by proxy sites that our showing our home page content in full. When i do a search for the tittle of our Home Page we are being ranked just below the proxy scraping site.

I have tried blocking the IPs but every time I get rid of one proxy scrapper another one pops up and out ranks us a couple of days later. I have submitted and Google reconsideration request and spam report but Google still seems to always rank our original 10 year old website lower than the proxy websites that our scrapping our content.

We have a very good backlink profile with links from from some major sites including links from Google own properties we have a excellent news section and over 6500 user reviews. I cant understand why we are having this problem.

Could anyone please help on how we can resolve this problem.
Any ideas?

p.s just noticed that the proxy site is even using Googles technology to steal content.. appspot.com

[dstiles]

Join the "Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification" forum and read the past year (at least) very carefully.

In essence, though: block all server farms (including google, ms etc apart from obvious bots such as googlebot/bingbot); detect and block all botnets (tricky but mostly possible); accept only known good user-agents.

Every time you block a range of IPs some other idiots get infected and taken over by botnet owners. You can never keep up by simply blocking botnet IPs.

Other than that, links, reviews etc, even from google, are of no use: panda is a killer. So is google apps.

[falsepositive]

Appspot.com and proxy.com were some I've seen. They appear to be everywhere. The question is, will Google clean this up, or are we responsible for policing this? I have been continually reporting these domains to Google via the spam report, but they are still quite visible.

[walkman]

The question is, will Google clean this up, or are we responsible for policing this? I have been continually reporting these domains to Google via the spam report, but they are still quite visible.

Seen them mentioned in G support forums with zero response.
I used DCMA, even though they weren't outranking me.

[c41lum]

I have submitted a DMCA and started a thread on webmaster central, no replies from any admins yet though.

[santapaws]

so is the conclusion people would be happy to give these sites a credit card but not yours?

[c41lum]

@santapaws i dont follow what do you mean?

It is my site just showing through a proxy URL!

[santapaws]

sorry it was a little tongue in cheek. The most common complaint i hear since panda is about being outranked by scrapers. I know it wasnt meant to be anything to do with scrapers and that the scraper update was before it but for me and everyone i speak to its the one big common factor, outranked by scrapers since panda went live. It also said that scraped content doesnt hurt you unless you have been penalised for other reasons. For me i notice that the worst hit pages come back when the scraped pages are removed. This is since panda not any other update. Panda is said to be a quality update not a penalty yet it works the same as a penalty on scraped pages. Google keeps giving 'would you trust this website with your credit card', as one of the criteria for the seed sites fed to panda. Therefore i simply ask, the pages that rank against you for your own content, or the website as a whole since its your content anyway, would they be a trustworthy site on a quick glance by an intermediate or lower web user thus satisfying the 'curb appeal' nature of panda?

[c41lum]

I dont think Proxy hijacking has anything to do with the Panda update. This type has been happening long before Panda, you would have thought by now google would have fixed this problem.

[netmeg]

I don't think they've unleashed their anti scraping algorithm yet. Just made little feints and stabs at it.

(And when they do, I'm sure there will be tons of false positives and reports of false positives and it'll be that all over again)