Copyright infringers get top position in search after I got penalised

[homeatpeace]

I am a newbie to this section of webmasterworld, since so far I never had any SEO issues. My problem started when my website got a heavy penalty from Google Search about 2 months before, the reasons for which are unknown to me. I was more worried today when I searched in G for a unique sentence within my site. Tens and hundreds of sites that illegally copied my website contents were listed above my site in the search result. I started my site 7 years before and was on top of search since last 5-6 years. So far till I got penalised, a similar search would list my site on top and 100s and 1000s of infringers below my site. In the past, I sent so many copyright notices to many site owners to remove illegal content, but with limited success. Later it became almost an impossible task, and I consoled myself that at least Google understands my rights, but now I lost my hope.
Today I sent a DMCA notice to G. Any views?

[Lame_Wolf]

In the past, I sent so many copyright notices to many site owners to remove illegal content, but with limited success

Forget going to the site owners. Raise a DMCA to their hosting provider. Sometimes, the ISP will tell you to contact the owner. Doing it this way (for me) receives better results - and quicker. It also alerts the ISP that they have infringed someone elses rights.

If you do decide to write to the owner, add something like this...
Do I raise the DMCA with you, or your hosting provider?
(If you know the hosting provider, mention it in the email) Works like a charm.

[homeatpeace]

Some of the infringements are several hundred public posts made in sites like en.wikibooks.org, www.scribd.com, docs.com, www.docstoc.com, answers.yahoo.com etc. Though I was successful initially to remove a few posts from scribd, others like yahoo answers were unsuccessful. Even new posts have exceeded previous removed posts in scribd. As I said now it is an impossible task to remove all illegal contents from those sites. Even to send copyright notices to all infringers will at least take me 6 months which I cannot afford at this time.
But my question is why Google dont consider webmasters DMCA rights, while imposing penalty? Let them remove a website from search results for competitive keywords. Why not assure protection to a unique keyword which is contained in one and only one website other than infringers.

[piatkow]

Raise a DMCA to their hosting provider.

Which only has legal force in the USA of course.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Curious to know if the top ranked scraper is a feed reading service(without naming names) because I'm also fighting this particular battle on my site. I filed DMCA notices with Google and was told Google would not act on this particular case due to "policy". In reality the feed reading site is doing exactly what Google images does.

Ignore this post if it's not a feed reading site that frames your content directly into a frame on their site. If it is I'd love to hear how Google or the ISP respond to your complaint.

[Lame_Wolf]

Which only has legal force in the USA of course.

Yes, but other countries do accept them - or have similar.

[homeatpeace]

Not feed reading sites. Those like en.wikibooks.org, www.scribd.com, docs.com, www.docstoc.com, answers.yahoo.com etc which allow public postings plus several other websites and blogs are the culprits.

[smithaa02]

I've had this with one of my sites as well. As soon as it was penalized, exact phrase searches did horribly against blatent scrapers.

I believe this has more to do with the penalty knocking you down as opposed to the scrapers doing so well in the SERP's.

Google's 'unique content awarder' is a complete mess regardless though and there was a great article on searchengineland.com on how it can be manipulated. What's scary with google unique content system is that it is all a secret trial/conviction/punishment done by a computer and it is difficult to know if you've been punished and you have no recourse. In many cases it is not practical for google to know if you are pirating information...for example a local business submits an event to our site and our competitors. It's the same copy and this it is honest good PR, yet one of his will probably get dinged in some fashion for duplicate content.

[Frost_Angel]

How do most owners keep an eye on people copying their content. I've found copyscape pretty useless. They missed someone that had scraped my entire site for four months! I found it by fluke.
I am constantly going through all pages of my site and doing checks for content by pasting and copying a unique sentence in Google and seeing what comes up. When I initially started doing this - I was floored. Out of the first 40 pages I checked (out of 440), every page had at least 10 sites that had copied my content.
(My site is 13 years old and all content is written by me - and some content is personal stories about my life... and they copied it word for word!)
It's tedious and time consuming, but I go after every single one - mainly through their host.
But you have to continually be checking - every day.

[homeatpeace]

Thanks Smithaa02 for sharing your insight and others for your valuable advices. Understood that at least I am not alone. Will try to send notices to hosts rather than owners; and as rightly told by frost_angel, will take up the tedious and time consuming job of attacking each and every infringer.

[boirun03]

I'm in the same boat as kickaxe. I've just recently noticed, within the last month the framed rss feed scraper has completely taken over my content and my pages are nowhere to be seen in google anymore. Out of 150 pages only a dozen show up anymore. And like the original poster here, I have been online and doing well in the serps for 10 years and now traffic from google is down 95% since panda 1. Almost two years now, with many improvements and 'doing it the white hat way' only to see traffic go down and down.

This scraper issue is out of control now that the results turn out the highest PR and then assign all the backlinks and social signals from your site to theirs. Crazy. At least that how I understood the searchengineland article today.

[onepointone]

more to do with the penalty knocking you down as opposed to the scrapers doing so well in the SERP's.

Agree with that, G's multiple penalties make all other considerations irrelevant.

I've found copyscape pretty useless

ditto

What I'm doing for now is pretty much giving up publishing on my own domains and putting my content on one of the current google "darlings". And it seems to be protected there. But it's obviously not a long term viable solution, so moving towards finding an offline and off google method of making a living.

[Scurramunga]

I am constantly going through all pages of my site and doing checks for content by pasting and copying a unique sentence in Google and seeing what comes up. When I initially started doing this - I was floored. Out of the first 40 pages I checked (out of 440), every page had at least 10 sites that had copied my content.
... ...It's tedious and time consuming, but I go after every single one - mainly through their host.
But you have to continually be checking - every day.

I was doing this too, with varying success. All my content is original and I am finding that I am not keeping up as theft of my text content and images have been occurring all over the net. Sometimes I wonder if my drop in rankings (from about 800 uniques per day to 40 on one of my sites) is a result of penalties I have incurred.

[Frost_Angel]

So in the end - it all comes down to trying to prevent these losers from stealing OUR content. How is this done? I use Wordpress - and I don't see any plugins that would help.
I use the authorship markup - doesn't seem to help. Copyscape is not really that great - can't rely on it.

So it's like we're just left spending all our time checking to see if our content is copied and issuing DMCAs, re-writing our own damn content because SO many have copied the original (and the version will get copied again eventually) or doing nothing and just throwing away years of work?

There needs to be a bloggers union or something so that these scrapers can be sued. I know that seems far fetched - but honestly - if we were songwriters or artists - we would listened to and the copying would be taken down.

Instead - Google lets the rats devour our content. Our awesome content and we can do nothing but post on forums like this expressing our anger.

It's ridiculous. What is the incentive for those of us producing good content to continue?

[MrSavage]

There is a Google doc in which you can report to Google examples of scraped content outranking the original page.

I think the issue is not about whether people are scraping our content, it's the issue of the scraper outranking our own content.

I can tell you that in one of my examples, it's a Goo*** exclusive and not happening in Bi**. One search engine knows who is the originator/owner and the other search engine which own 95% of the traffic doesn't. That's the bad part.

In my opinion, it's only the tip of the ice berg. We are in a new era of content theft in my opinion. Smart scrapers have high PR because that appears to be the key to victory.

Help them do their job. At least fill in that scraper form. I never see it mentioned in these types of posts for whatever reason. If people aren't submitting examples to them about scapers outranking original content, they might think all is well out there.

Closing comment. How about these clowns who develop Word Press get their heads out of their A and realize that default RSS is like handing over your spare car keys to a car thief. Baffling and incredibly stupid in my opinion.

[menntarra 34]

File a DMCA request(google it to do it properly) to the ISP(faster than to contact the owner who might answer a week later) of those sites' server where the content is.

-----------<IF they copied the whole site>------------
IF they copied the whole site, you can also put a link on your website for a couple of days about the infringing site, to have it marked as "malware" , cause they might steal accounts from your site, just by having the same look.
[google.com...]
#obviously after ?url= the infringing site
-----------</IF they copied the whole site>------------

I always do this, 2 days at most, the site is either deleted, or marked as malware. Hope this helps.

[HuskyPup]

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the idea however I'me not quite sure what you mean.

I have an entire site copied by an Italian company using a .eu, a DMCA is pointless. Even though their registrar is huge I find it incredulous that their site has NO legal contact address etc, in fact they give an e-mail address which bounces back and tells you that it has bounced and one must register to contact them.

I did that and STILL no legal contact address. On a daily basis I am now sending each different department my complaint but yet I have to receive even an acknowledgement.

It's at times like this I seriously consider a DDOS to get their attention ... They have obviously had their customer training from the market leaders of ignorance... GOOGLE!

I can tell you that in one of my examples, it's a Goo*** exclusive and not happening in Bi**. One search engine knows who is the originator/owner and the other search engine which own 95% of the traffic doesn't. That's the bad part.

Amazing freakin' amazing isn't it. Add me to your list ... How the heck can it be that many of my images that date from 2000/01 and scrapers from 2007 onwards can be ahead of me when the image itself gives the date?

Google like to think of themselves as being clever, they just have no concept of how stupid they actually are.

[Frost_Angel]

File a DMCA request(google it to do it properly) to the ISP(faster than to contact the owner who might answer a week later) of those sites' server where the content is.

Ummm.... I don't have 40 hours a week to dedicate to this? Every page of my site has been copied by 100's of losers. Who the hell has time to do this and constantly looking over their back weeding these thieves out? I'm a mom at home with kids to feed? I don't have tons of money for a staff to help me stay on top of this? I have time to write and research really good content - and maintain my site. I shouldn't feel like I have to launch a theft campaign every time I post something.
It's insane. I think these people need to be fined and Google needs to step up their super smart search engine to help the REAL AUTHORS! Instead they perpetuate the issue with their rather STUPID algorithm. There's no brilliance in Panda or Penguin. Or EMD or ATF.... there is only a greed for money and answering to shareholders and board members. I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a realist.

[bwnbwn]

Frost the site sounds like a manual review and you were hit. I would forget all the copied crap and figure out why you were hit. I had the same thing happen years ago and it had nothing to do with the copied scrapers my site was filtered. Figured it out sent in a request and came back took months back then but if you can discover the cause it is much faster today.

[Frost_Angel]

@bwnbwn

There is no manual penalty on my site. I just got a reconsideration request back telling me so a week ago.

[Tami]

MrSavage,

There is a Google doc in which you can report to Google examples of scraped content outranking the original page.

Where can I find this?

[MrSavage]

I don't know how to link here or if I'm allowed <see below>

---

Mod note: Thanks MrSavage for finding this. Links to official Google documents are always OK.

I'm adding a link to official Google Scraper Report Form and also to the Aug 2011 WebmasterWorld discussion about the form. I'm also removing the search terms....

Report scraper pages
[docs.google.com...] [docs.google.com...]

Matt Cutts Announces Scraper Site Reporting Tool
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4355698.htm [webmasterworld.com]

.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:26 pm (utc) on Nov 17, 2012]
[edit reason] added links, removed search terms [/edit]

[HuskyPup]

Thanks MrSavage, I've just submitted mine...this will be interesting:-)

[SevenCubed]

Robert, thanks for the links above.

[HuskyPup]

My update - I've actually had a response from the Italian registrar and things seem to be moving and with the Google submission I have fingers crossed that this 5 year old scraper will soon be gone ... Hopefully

[Frost_Angel]

I used the scraper form too - yesterday. I'll be anxious to see what happens. Will keep all posted.

[homeatpeace]

Thought of giving an update about 4 months after my original post. My site came back to its original position within about a month after I made the post. But still scraper sites are showing up on top for exact phrase searches. Just before making this post, I made a search to verify this and found my site at 17th position in an exact phrase search. Anyway thanks Google for bringing me back. But the worry about scraper sites is worsening with each new SERP update of Google, as understood from other posts here in WebmasterWorld and outside.