adsense thieves what to look out for

[RobinK]

We found a site that is copying other sites pages by the 100's and then inserting their own adsense publisher id in the code.

You can compare the source codes of the original pages with the stolen pages and the only differnce is in the publisher id.

If the original page didn't have adsense they went ahead and took the liberty of adding it to the bottom.

Of course they did make one small mistake they left our javascript with the tracking code on it. So bascially from our tracking statistics we can see how many clicks they are getting from our stolen content.

Watch out everyone and watch your tracking, if you don't have tracking and aren't going to get tracking look for referrers from sites that are using your images in your log files. They rarely change the image paths this one didn't.

And I would be interested if anyone else has found sites like this.

Robin

[edited by: Woz at 4:22 am (utc) on April 6, 2005]
[edit reason] no stickies please, see TOS#13 [/edit]

[no9t9]

i just noticed today in my awstats that there was a browser of type "web copier". I hope that doesn't mean they are gonna rip my site...

I know some people use these for offline browsing... but if they ARE gonna rip my site, what can be done?

[arubicus]

Robink

Just sticky'd you. I think I have seen this many times. It is somewhat of a scraper taking full content but haven't noticed any of them yet that removes publisher id's and replaces them.

What is scary if they did do it right and removed any tracking scripts and images (or upload images to their server and remove any references to your site) people would never know that this is going on unless you keep a sharp eye out for dupe content on search engines. That would be a never ending chore on sites with tens of thousands of pages.

[tallguy]

There are greedy webmasters trying to make quick adsense money by stealing content from other sites. Some of them use a website copier.

So, It's best to regularly copy and paste pages from your site on google to see if it appears on other sites or you can try copyscape.

Adsense knows about this and will shut down accounts where there is copyright infringement. You can email adsense and they would guide you.

There was a very nice post by Jenstar about this :

[webmasterworld.com...]

[RobinK]

I have emailed adsense, waiting for a reply from them to see how we are going to react to the copyright infringement.

[crescenta]

I guess that's one more good reason to put copyright notices on all your pictures and graphics (with the exception of web and menu graphics). If you have a graphics-heavy site (and hundreds of graphics), what content thief is going to want to Photoshop out all your copyright notices before they steal your content?

[arubicus]

Most don't bother so they pull the images off your site leaving a nice trail to follow which is a good thing. But if they steal the whole page, upload the images to their server (they don't care about copyrights on content so why would they care about it being on images), the individual surfer wouldn't see a difference but the url in the location bar. With the images on their server and all references to your site in the html/javascript or whatever are remove leaving no trail back to your site it is very hard to catch them unless you look for them in SERPS. Having huge sites this tends to be a bit tedious to have to drag the SERPS looking for violators. Also if it is bad enough you can get the good ol' dupe content penalty and take it up the wazoo that way.

[jstar]

Had the same thing happen to me a couple of months back. Emailed Adsense. Their response was that they couldn't do anything until I filled out the DMCA. In writing, listing every single URL affected.

For tens of thousands of URLs...that would be quite a chore. Needless to say, I have not done this yet. :(

[arubicus]

From what I have seen from Robink's example it is about 2000+ different sites that they are doing it to. Taking complete web pages and copying them and removing adsense id's and replacing them with their own. Adding adsense if the page originally does not have it.

[crescenta]

Any content thief who hotlinked to graphics would (or *should*) get the no-hotlinking "this graphic belongs to mysite.com" graphic for every image they stole, which would not look too well on their site. Copying all the graphics and uploading them to their own server would work better, but some people would notice that the copyright notice on the graphics and the URL didn't match.

But sure, with thousands of pages, getting them all removed would be a huge hassle. But at least it would so obvious and easy to make the case for stolen content, when all the stolen graphics still have your © notice and URL on them!

[arubicus]

He he that is always a fun thing to do. "We are dirty rotten image and content stealers..."

Even with copyright notices they will take those images if they want them. The trick is to catch them. Unless they are caught they will keep using your images/content to make a buck. They just shut down their opperation and do it again and again until they get busted big time with leagal action and fines.

HINT: 99.9% of the time a good ol' email from the [e-mail] works many wonders:)

[edited by: arubicus at 8:19 am (utc) on April 6, 2005]

[Reid]

I'd get them booted off adsense first. And send a complaint to google directory also.
Then an e-mail from legaldept

[arubicus]

Yep that is what I would do. Shut down the money flow first. Then notify the "legaldepartment" and have them shut down the site. (Webmasters and Webhosts really work well with you with a polite email from the legal department). You don't want to tick them off just shake a little bit. They may try to retaliate in some bad ways. You could also notify some of the other websites that they do this to and let them put the pressure on. Keeping in contact with them through an anonymous name and email address.

[no9t9]

what do you guys think if someone takes your pictures or content but comments on them, like a review, and also provides a link to your site saying where they got it?

[Zygoot]

>what do you guys think if someone takes your pictures or content but comments on them, like a review, and also provides a link to your site saying where they got it?

That's OK for me as long as they don't copy everything. Maximum 1-3 paragraphs depending on the length of the article.

[beren]

And I would be interested if anyone else has found sites like this.

All the time. Yes, they are sometimes too stupid to remove the javascript tracking code, but usually they do remove it. Often just wholesale copies of pages, with ads put in.

We probably average 1 to 1.5 per week. The lawyer sends and e-mail and usually the problem goes away. But it is a big administrative cost for us to deal with this. Google's introduction of AdSense has cost us a lot of money.

I'd get them booted off adsense first. And send a complaint to google directory also.

Have you ever tried this? It doesn't happen. Google will not kick someone out of AdSense for stealing content. They will send you back an e-mail saying that they are not in the copyright policing business and that you should deal with it on your own. Google DOES NOT kick out bad AdSense publishers.

Shut down the money flow first.

Google won't kick anyone out for stealing content. You can have your legal dept threaten the bad publisher and he will usually take down your content. And put up content stolen from somewhere else, most likely. But he gets to remain an AdSense publisher.

[arubicus]

Actually Google Adsense will if it they are using it and they break the TOS.

[kokopoko]

This is happening to me right now. One of my sites recently got copied by another site and they left my tracking code in place. It is very frustrating.

[RobinK]

Thanks for all the advice and help I received, one member in particular really helped me out. Thank you so much.

The site that was stealing has pulled their script that changed the publisher id's to their own on the google ads, they also quit adding their own google ads to the bottom of every page as well.

They did change from 200's to 302 redircts now though.

I still haven't heard anything back from adsense on this, and they still have adsense on their own category pages.

[Reid]

Google won't kick anyone out for stealing content. You can have your legal dept threaten the bad publisher and he will usually take down your content. And put up content stolen from somewhere else, most likely. But he gets to remain an AdSense publisher.

That really really sucks. Here they could take down a whole bunch of problems in one clean sweep. If they guy is copying entire websites that is.
Kick em out of adsense and they got no reason to steal content anymore.
here people are worried about getting booted from adsense for 'reasons unknown' and they won't even touch a guy like this?

[robsynnott]

When your traffic code is still getting loaded, there'd be a temptation to put something nasty in it. A javascript redirect to the real site, perhaps? They couldn't complain; "oh, but I was just modifying my javascript on my site"...

[RobinK]

Reid,

I totally agree, at the very least he should have had to pull it off of that site. I do know of one more site that is his (he was doing the same thing on it) and he fixed that one too.

How many more sites this guy had that was (or still is) stealing content and replacing the adsense publisher id on I will probably never know.

I am hoping the adsense team had the opportunity to visit his site before he changed it all.

[cagey1]

When your traffic code is still getting loaded, there'd be a temptation to put something nasty in it

Please - do not put in something that will violate the Adsense TOS - this would be unethical

[blairsp]

Please - do not put in something that will violate the Adsense TOS - this would be unethical

It wouldn't be unethical, it would get you kicked out of adsense once they catch up with you.

[budapesttips]

How about some little javascript included in every page:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (window.location.host!= 'www.yourserver.com') {
window.location="http://www.yourserver.com/";
}
</script>

This basically checks if the page is running from the www.yourserver.com host, and if not, then redirects there. Of course, it can be removed from the page too, but this can be one more bumper in the way of stealing.

[bloke in a box]

jstar - what I would suggest for getting the list of urls, is get a website scraper (for a legitimate reason!) and get it to crawl every url in your site, most of them will allow you to export a list of the urls crawled and then you could just copy and paste them.

[HitProf]

They did change from 200's to 302 redircts now though

I seriously doubt if you're better off now.

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[RobinK]

HitProf,

You are so right. They fixed one problem and then changed it to another one.

But I have been watching the site and it seems to be having some problems on msn, google, and yahoo.

They have went totally supplemental on google and have very few pages listed even as supplemental, I think they are being totally weeded out of the google index.