mirroring to improve rankings

[pixelkitty]

I was alerted today that <snip> were mirroring some of my sites.

Apparantly, they do this to try to improve their google rankings.

Does google have a policy on sites that illegally syndicate or mirror site content (or in my case, entire websites)?

Is there a point of contact for informing Google of such a blatent abuse of the system?

Argueably, <snip> has a crap page rank anyway. This is no way reduces the badness of their tactics.

As a side note, I have blocked <snip> from accessing my servers via htaccess, so the mirroring should end shortly.

[edited by: Woz at 2:46 am (utc) on April 2, 2003]
[edit reason] no URLs please [/edit]

[rfgdxm1]

The mods should soon delete the specifics you mentioned. Search "DMCA" in Google.

[pixelkitty]

The DMCA only applies to American law.

The mirror sites are in kr and jp, the sites mirrored are from all over the world, mine being mostly australian based and hosted, so I dont think the DMCA will have any jurisdiction over this.

But the question is, does google regard mirroring without permission as a form of spam or manipulation that is filtered out of their results?

[NotePad]

As far as i understand Google only aknnowledges the oldest version of the mirrored content to prevent this exact scenario.

[Stefan]

Have you tried contacting the sites and telling them to take the copies down? If you can prove that your content was online first, you should have copyright in any jurisdiction.

[pixelkitty]

Yes, I used WHOIS to email the domain owner, but doubt I will receive any response.

It's much easier to use .htaccess or other technology to block all traffic from that domain than hunt them down.

Im hoping their automatic mirroring process will be blocked from this and all my content will eventually drop off their site.

I have also informed a number of very highly ranked sites that they are also mirrored by the same site.

Hopefully one of them has another money or a legal department who can take further action.

[garylo]

Is there a point of contact for informing Google of such a blatent abuse of the system?

Try their spam report at [google.com...]