Unsavory site using my group's name for search engine rankings

What can I do?

[kaethy]

A few days ago, I was searching thru google for one of our many sites.
I discovered that a couple of unsavory sites have used my groups name and
loosely associated phrases to get their site showing in search engines.

I went to one of the sites, & looked at the source code, but saw nothing there to
see how it was done. They all look like blogs. How are they doing this & what
can I do about it?

[edited by: caveman at 6:27 am (utc) on Mar. 23, 2006]
[edit reason] No specifics please, per TOS. [/edit]

[moltar]

They just use generators that create the websites from snippest of search results and rss feends and other crap... They didn't create those pages manually to target your site. You can try filing complaints, but I'd just ignore it. It's useless. You'll waste more time then you'd gain from this whole situation. You kill one site and 10 more pop-up the next day. I just learned to ignore them.

[caveman]

Hi kaethy,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld - happy to have you here!

FYI, we try to avoid specifics around here, choosing instead to outline the issues in clear but general terms. We find that overall, this approach helps the widest number of members (i.e., who may be suffering from the same issues, albeit with specific kw's/categories/whatever). This approach also keeps us focused on Webmastering issues, rather than on category specifics.

best regards,
caveman

[kaethy]

Thing is, I don't think our search engine rankings are that high, and the people who search for our groups name are not their target audience. So it doesn't make any sense to me.

OK, guess I have to ignore it <sigh>

I'll be less specific next time, thanks.

[moltar]

people who search for our groups name are not their target audience. So it doesn't make any sense to me.

As I said, this is usually not the intended result. The way I imagine how this works is pretty simple. Spammers get huge keyword lists (maybe millions of keywords), then they automatically (using some software) do queries to search engines and save the results into the blog posts, pretending this to be a real post. So eventually they end up with millions of generated pages.

They probably searched for some keyword that was very similar to yours and your site showed up and that is how it got scraped.