Observation - Are Blogs The Way To Stop Scraping & Image Copying/Etc

[HuskyPup]

I am not sure whether this has anything to do with the Panda or Penguin however it is very evident that Google has a major problem with assigning an image to the correct website whereas Bing seemingly has little problem with either the original image or text.

I have quite a few hand-built gallery sites and obviously all these sites have images on them. Many of the images have been copied to death over the past 12 years or so and I do not rank for many of them now...my fault, I should have watermarked them from the beginning the same as I do with all my new sites these days, interestingly many of the sites that now beat me in the image SERPs are built on WordPress and Blogster sites.

I also have several blogs with many images on them and whilst none of the images are watermarked, and I'm fairly sure many must have been copied, I'm fairly sure that no one ranks above me for those images hosted on WordPress.

I found this out only yesterday, 1st January 2013, purely by luck when I saw one of my 10 year old images from one of my handbuilt galleries disappear and be replaced by an Indian July 2012 Blogspot site at #3 in images and displayed on the SERPs page at the top. This site has come from absolutely nowhere and, of course, is running AdSense, it certainly is not an authority site however every image on the site has been copied from mine but none of the technical data, only the images.

My question has to be is Google's Panda/Penguin giving blog sites priority over evergreen sites purely because of the date marking in blogs whereas probably on most older sites there is not one? Could this possibly be what their foul-up is all about and why it is that many of us keep seeing scrapers all over the place?

I have no idea whether I am correct or not other than it seems very coincidental that many of the sites I see with my copied images are on blogging platforms therefore I am going to take one of my older small sites, copy it into a WordPress blog on a completely new and unused domain and see what happens!

What do others feel about my observation?

Have you seen similar but it's never really registered or am I just going Gorg-crazy?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My image headaches began last month when Google wrongfully assigned 35-40% of my images to their explicit category and, of course, sites that scraped those very same images enjoy the family friendly filter.

It seems where Google is going wrong isn't with the image itself, its with the url to the image being on the other site. It's being treated like a mention or even a backlink and you know how much Google loves mashup sites, mashup outranks original sources quite readily for some sites much the same way framing your site onto another page with a few additional links pointing to it works.

The trick is to watermark and block hotlinking from day one.

Another effective technique is to block Google from hotlinking the images too. They will still index the images but will show a cached copy of the image instead of your image in hotlink and the scrapers can hotlink google cache images all they like, it won't affect you.

[HuskyPup]

My point is "Has Google actually lost their original formation data point for many sites and images"?

Just how can scrapers come along with very basic blog sites with absolutely no authority whatsoever and beat the original from many years before? I am not just referring to my sites, nearly everyone can identify with this.

We know Google has screwed-up big time over this yet the mainstream media has not and obviously does not care and, for whatever reason(s), not cottoned onto this meanwhile many of us have been battling against it yet no one listens.

A few years ago I was having HUGE hotlinking problems yet many, including WebmasterWorld members, didn't really care, they didn't appreciate the scale of the problem nor why anyone would be bothered about it...obviously they were not image centric! Things have changed amongst those webmasters since then.

So, just to see if I am correct, and I am 99% sure I am, over the next 3 months, yes three months, I am going to devote a lot of energy into seeing just how much Google is skewed by various blogging platforms.

Call me stupid, either way I should know the answer, when I have it just how valuable will it be? :-)

[aristotle]

We know Google has screwed-up big time over this yet the mainstream media has not and obviously does not care

Apparently Google doesn't care either.

As for your basic question, when something is screwed up as badly as this is, you'll probably never be able to make any sense out of it.

[Robert Charlton]

Possibly these two threads will offer some help. They both discuss using pubsubhubbub (PuSH) technology to send a "fat ping" to Google to help establish authorship.

The technology which has been built into Wordpress, among other platforms, to combat scraping. I don't know how much of this might apply to Image Search as well as text search... and I still have some questions about implementation... but I thought it worth mentioning here....

Blogger scraping my content
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4465541.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Questioning the wisdom of using fat pings to deal with scrapers
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4520212.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[HuskyPup]

you'll probably never be able to make any sense out of it

Quite simply if I create a brand new blog on a never used before domain I have and duplicate an existing site, the ensuing results could be enlightening.

Apart from the site I mentioned in my original post another one has appeared, again using all my images on their blog from, of all places, Rwanda!

That's central/east Africa if you don't know...this is getting stupid!

[Lame_Wolf]

HuskyPup, are you raising DMCAs at all? You should, esp with blogger/blogspot.

If I were you, i'd watermark all images - even the old ones. Then, raise DMCAs with as many sites as possible.

[HuskyPup]

A DMCA with Rwanda and India and in another case Italy none of whom are using US servers?

All my new sites have watermarked images these days, I should have listened to Leosghost years ago, anyway, my old images, about 12 years old, have been the de facto standard for many sites and that was originally my intent for creating them since so many sites in my industry had diabolical images and I wanted them all to present a far better impression to both the retail customer and architects/specifiers/etc.

The images I now create are far better mostly because of the advancement of digital photography allowing for large quality images so much cheaper.

This is an example - Think of instead of a 150 mm square piece of wood either photographed or scanned, now I can take pictures easily of the full plank or tree and take loads of them at realistically no extra cost or effort. I used to do a lot of photography and it was so time-consuming and extremely expensive whereas today no one can make an excuse for not having decent images.

Back to my original point though, just why is it that Google seems to have lost the original image owner, why is it that we are seeing so many blogging sites come from nowhere and displace far superior sites?

I've already starting constructing one site in WordPress and I'm going to try and get ten completed by the end of January. Whatever it proves either way will be interesting!

[Lame_Wolf]

A DMCA with Rwanda and India and in another case Italy none of whom are using US servers?

I had a number of Polish and Hungarian ones, and they were using Godaddy. The images quickly disappeared.

In your case, you mentioned they were blogs. Guessing here... were they blogger or blogspot? If so, raise it with Google. It doesn't matter what the TLD is if it is blogpsot/blogger as they are owned by Google.

If you need a hand getting them removed, PM me.

[diberry]

DCMAs will at least get Google to remove the infringing SERP result. I've used it with regard to stolen images several times, and always they get removed.