Forum Moderators: phranque
I don't want to be in any of them. If someone wants to say something about my site they can email me direct I don't want some anonymous public review. As far as I see it these wiki sites are just cashing in on my topics and keywords and are just more clutter to wade through in searches.
If you seriously believe you can censor the web, good luck to you. In most countries, people have a prefectly legal right to discuss you and your site.
So long as they do not libel you, steal your content or otherwise damage you, be grateful for the visitors they send you.
I was recently looking for a dentist, and found a site that allows users to rate and review their dentist. The site, however, allows dentists to "opt out" of the site. In my city, apx. 50% of the total dentists had opted-out.
What good is a site like that? It's of zero value.
As previously pointed-out, these sites have every right to rate, review, criticize, applaud, etc. your site. Live with it.
That said, it sounds from your description that these sites most likely ARE low-quality, zero-information sites wanting to cash in on your keywords. I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the genre', but it sounds like a wikified version of a link farm. Since you can't mention the URL in public here, I'd be very interested if you wouldn't mind sending me sticky-mail with an example.
Unfortunately, you have to accept the bad with the good. They still have a right to talk about you, even if there's no point to it, and nobody is reading.
I don't have a problem with people mentioning my site. Hundreds of people do that all the time. They love me. :) Many schools have me linked to their sites and teachers have me bookmarked for the students.
I just have a problem with these wiki sites that have suddenly been popping up and mungeing my trademarked names (breaking the name in two and/or capitalizing letters in the middle to make it look like two words) then grabbing data off my pages including my site names and my personal name but chopping it up into odd sentences and mixing it with other sites content to create nonsensical babble. They ARE stealing my data not just rating my sites and discussing me. When I discover them I promptly write to the whois contact and they manually remove the pages but the info is still cached in the search engines and unable to delete because they never totally remove the page. They must be using something to crawl and grab the info so I figure there must be a wiki type bot that I could disallow. Hope that makes more sense. I prefer to prevent them from creating it then having to chase them down.
thanks
Now I see what you are talking about. These are not real review sites. They simply scrape content from your site, illegally display your copyrighted logo, etc.
Somebody with deep pockets should take them to court.
I checked the entry on one of these for my ISP. (Wasn't going to me them one of MY URLs, LOL!) They had some text scraped from their site - more, I would say, than is "fair use". And they had their logo - clearly a copyright violation.
I doubt it is even a real wiki. Can you actually edit the pages? I wasn't about to actually register... I suspect they just copied the look-and-feel of MediaWiki, but it isn't really a wiki. It's just scraped content and the worst kind of blatent copyright violation.
That said, this doesn't go that much more over the line than Google and other search engines with their cached content. (In fact, I DO think that Google steps over the line...)
Reviews are one thing. But these aren't reviews.
The first site you sent me claims to be a site where website owners can post information about their websites. Based on your account, I believe that this is probably a sham. YOU didn't put in your entry - it was pre-loaded for you without your permission or knowledge.
A couple of possibilities on how to deal with this:
- If this is, in fact, NOT a real wiki which is masquerading as a MediaWiki site, WikiMedia may have cause for action. You may be able to interest them in this.
- Perhaps there could be an organized effort to submit DMCA takedown requests to the appropriate party - to the point that they are denied service. Note my curious wording, "the appropriate party". Not sure who that would be. The individual who owns this site apparently has their own IP address block. I believe they host on their own server in a data center. Not sure if this individual owns the data center. In any case, it's not going to be as easy as simply sending a DMCA request to their ISP. They don't have an ISP. But, obviously, they have upstream Internet connections.
I note that the individual who owns the site has a background that makes him likely well-versed in the legal technicalities of this, and is probably well-practiced at walking fine lines...
Edit: a bit of poking around in the search you sent me reveals that it IS a real wiki, and has caused quite a stir amongst bloggers, who have expressed their universal distaste of this.
Unfortunately, the individual is too well-connected for peons like us to do much about it. Welcome to the latest wrinkle in the spam game! I guess you could try the "opt out" procedure outlined on the website to prevent your sites from being pre-loaded.
If he uses adsense, for example, his theft is against their TOS.
I added the disallow so their bots wouldn't create new pages.
On the other one they created a domain with a targeted keyword in mind then grab any website and it's content that contains the word.
The best way I can think to discourage more from popping up is to get the search engines to filter them out or ban them.
thanks,
:)
