Omitted results. Forget links for negative seo.heres a new way!

[philgames]

Hello,

You may or may not remember a thread I created not so long ago concerning a spam hacker selling the usual fake counterfeit goods.. hacking sites and adding gibberish articles created from scraping sentences from my site and loads others and mashing them together (no spinning of the sentences either).

This has caused as I thought it might have my site to be removed from google. Not penalized but removed.

My site appears where it always has done but in the omitted results only.

Does this mean that negative seo can be done without even linking to a site now? Just constant creation of duplicate content can cause a site to be pushed into the omitted pile.. and google needs to reevaluate (if spam keeps getting created your never going to get out of the omitted results?)

Also because its just sentences what if google is thinking my site is constructing articles from randomly pulled articles too?

-The spammer hacker is doing this for sentences across my whole site meaning my sites has been crawled and everything pulled from products pages, to the contact page.
-DMCAS are impossible each day new hacked pages are appearing with small chunks from my site on.


Ps I know this wasn't a negative seo attempt but rather a natural occurrence of my site unluckily getting scraped and then added to the "list" of sites to crawl and scrape... the moron spammer really doesn't know what he is doing as it really is a random mess of irrelevant gibberish his articles create but is doing it on a HUGE scale.

What are your thoughts?

Am I doomed?

thank you

[not2easy]

I realize it may be late to close the barn door, but if everything you add to your site is being scraped and spun, I would take the necessary time to start documenting what you can determine, to have a solution.

Keep track of any new URLs you find, run whois to see where they are hosted, whose site(s) are these? The records exist and they are public. They may hide their identity but the IP is a fixed point.

I'd bet that the URLs are hosted on just a few hosts and that with some time poring over your records, you can see the unnatural visits to your site and determine where they come from - probably from a limited number of IPs. If you haven't been keeping an eye on your access logs, it can be most revealing to start sorting through them. If your traffic is lower than it was before, that makes non-human visits stand out even more. When you know what is causing you pain, you can usually make it stop.

[rish3]

There's really no recourse here, other than re-writing the content, posting it on a new domain, and implementing some anti-scraping strategy. It's too late for this one.

Most likely, the spammer is using your content as "seed content" to be posted on sites with links embedded in the text for SEO purposes. The links are pointing at some other site, likely, the spammer's customer.

If you're intent on chasing the issue..."follow the money". If my hunch is right, your scrambled content has links in it, pointing to the source of the money.

If I'm wrong, look at the generated pages and try and figure out what the angle is. Are the sites they are posted on monetizing in any way? Or are they trying to provide some SEO (or other) benefit to some different site?

[Robert Charlton]

philgames - Is this the domain we discussed where Google cleared the old manual penalty after you bought it because you'd liked its backlinks?....

Manual action pure spam. wasnt me!
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4639293.htm [webmasterworld.com]

If it is, you may have been making incorrect assumptions about how far those backlinks would take you. Can't say without knowing more, but that's what I'm thinking.

I should add that with regard to others apparently ranking on your scraped content, the devil is in the details. I agree that Google's historically has had problems with attributing content correctly... but again, the details can get complicated.

The sites I've seen that don't rank for quoted original text strings have generally had other problems, usually backlink problems, occasionally problems with how they've linked out, and/or often Panda problems. What the text strings are in relation to what you've targeted your page for also enters into it.

And the spam site may not be ranking because of your content. It may be ranking because of backlinks from hacked sites... in which case it might be a "short term" problem that still might take a while to fix.

I just posted a long discussion about hacked sites and spammers over in our Search Engine Promotion forum, and am not up to covering the same points again now, but you might want to take a look...

Blackhat in top placed google results
Google listing blackhat websites
http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_promotion/4690167.htm [webmasterworld.com]

We need here more information about the domain, and a better characterization of the level of competition... ie, are you in a spammy niche and going after terms that a black-hatter would go after? How old is your site? How have you been getting your backlinks, etc?

And again, if we're talking about that penalized domain, it might have been cleared by Google, but it might also be in a spammer's little black book.

PS: Also, please give us a link to the previous thread you created about the counterfeit goods hacker.

[philgames]

Hello, thank you for the replies.

This is my main money earner and is a shop website. The spammer has scraped my product descriptions, the homepage and even the contact us page as though he just scraped a list of sites crawled them all and extracted the content of them all. The domain is 2 years old with around 60 referring domains (including 2 very powerful natural football league sites pointing to it).

Iv never had any downs when a penguin or panda updates comes along in fact Iv always gained places. Why I think it more concerns the duplicate content is that when you go through the omitted results my site is still in exactly the same place. (I notice some other sites get omitted like amazon pages too, though they have a non ommitted listing so its all okay for them.)

The niche I am in isnt dominated by spammers just dominated by big brands all about the niche. Though the top big brands are ranking high through paid sponsor links (one has a terrible link profile but has tons of sponsored pr5 and 4 links from a site wide on a irrelevant tv channel website).


The spam articles are a real mess with my sentences being dumped randomly with other irrelevant spam articles... non of the sentences are related in any way very random. (The spammer has tons of counterfeit website which he keeps on replacing (churn and burn) and has different websites he promotes for each of the spammy counterfeit goods items like 1 for knownbrand widgets, 1 for pills and so forth.



-also if I search my brand name thousands of spam results pop up under my site

----Another thing just to put out there you maybe thinking that my grammar is appalling and that may have caused this... well I didnt write the content my brother did and hes a lot lot better at writing.

here is the link to my other post.

[webmasterworld.com...]

As you can see not that long ago at all.


Edit: One more thing I like your idea about blocking the scrapers however I have been looking on blackhatforums and the technique they use may be that they are using dynamic ips and software.

Such as scraping using "site:" or a spider then using one of many content scrapers which also mash up sentences and inject links.

Lol, I was only making £50 a week and now that is nothing.


Another thing to point out is that one of my competition has sometimes 2 results for a week or two but at the most part just 1 result on the main serps but I have noticed that this reuslt that appears and disappears is found in the ommitted results.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:03 am (utc) on Jul 30, 2014]
[edit reason] removed brand references [/edit]