Google images ranking content thieves

[indyank]

One of the sites I manage has a few very rare photos. These had been ranking fine since 2007 but now some content thieves are hosting these images on their server and ranking for them. More than 50% of these content thieves are hosting these images on Google owned servers - blogspot. There are other professional thieves (who are supposed to be reasonable authorities in this niche) who also host them and rank for them. These professionals have a great terms and conditions page where they claim the content to be their own copyrighted stuff.

I am working on issuing DMCA notices but there are so many thieves in this niche and it is going to take years fighting them as they crop up everyday.

However these are some things I notices.

1) The content thieves were hosting these content only from 2011 or so while it had been on my site for a much longer time frame (from 2007). Google is know to not forget anything but somehow they seem to forget this imp. information.

2) There aren't any value adds by those sites to these copied content and i only see ads everywhere on their pages. Still they rank ahead of us in google images!

So how and why is google crediting them? How can we regain ranking for our own images.

We use a frame buster script on our pages and could this be a ranking issue?

[tedster]

I wonder if this new step in organic text search will impact image search too: DMCA Notices Will Be a Factor in Search [webmasterworld.com]

[Leosghost]

I wonder if this new step in organic text search will impact image search too: DMCA Notices Will Be a Factor in Search [webmasterworld.com]

No..it is merely an exercise in "buck passing" by the plex..as indyank rightly points out , Google has the the data and the technology to have been able to stop image theft and content scraping, they have chosen not to, because their own business model is based upon it, and they are lobbying hard in many countries for copyright works by others to be given to them to display ( with ads around ) and then even license the use of the works which are not theirs to do so , to 3rd parties..

Every time a click is made on adsense on a site which is using copyright works which it does not have permission to do so, Google profits..

Google, via adsense, facilitates, profits from, and encourages copyright abuse and IP abuse in general...

[indyank]

I wonder if this new step in organic text search will impact image search too: DMCA Notices Will Be a Factor in Search

Hmm...but this one is another change that is open to abuse as people have rightly pointed out on Searchengineland and elsewhere...

But why isn't google using its own data to rank the right pages? They definitely have the complete database (including removed pages) of every site. Couldn't Google make reasonable use of it, as it was doing just a couple of year back. Though I am not arguing that copied content ranking higher is a recent issue, things changed to the worse only in the recent past.

[tedster]

Yes - if it really is such a major technical challenge, then Google certainly could do a better job with their "transparency" on this issue. It's not easy to see why they can't do a greatly improved job on stopping all kinds of Intellectual Property theft, image and text.

The only challenging factor I can see for images is that more and more sites are hosting their images on a different domain for speed improvement.