HELP! How do I stop scraper sites - is there any recourse?
-
Our site has lots of unique content and photos and it is constantly being scraped and posted on other websites. Most of these are no-name sites that pop up and exist for adwords revenue.
Aside from the fact that we don't want our content being copied, this is an SEO nightmare because they often link back to us from pages that are stuffed with keywords and have very low domain authority (it's a form of negative SEO).
My question is:
Does anyone have experience with fighting this phenonmenon?
What have you done that is effective?
Does anyone have experience with a service such as http://www.dmca.com/ProtectionPro.aspx ? Does it work/is it worth it?
Any input is appreciated!
-
Nice link Mark. News to me, really. But the fact that Schema.org and HTML5 both have author identification methods shows that it may be used by other search engines and/or services. And the followup article to your link there is "Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not." http://searchengineland.com/google-authorship-dead-author-rank-202254
But darn, man! All that time wasted getting authorship to work back then. Google's authorship verification process was indeed grueling.
-
I agree with everything besides for the authorship markup bit. Authorship markup is not being tracked by Google anymore - see http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975.
That said, the larger point about being the first content to go up is a good one. If we can all figure out where the original is from, assume that Google can too.
-
Kevin has a really good point here. You need to input markup that tells Google that the content is yours. I find that adding self-referential canonical tags can help with this. Just be careful to input them correctly.
-
Two schools on that one. They may not be hurting your business now, so you can forget about them. That's only until you can't. If they continue rip off your work, they may take from you in the future--ad revenue, traffic stats, e-commerce, news reports, whatever you're doing--that's all money. If I had time to fill out the form, I'd do it.
-
First thing to do is insert authorship markup and check that google recognizes you as an author of the site you're posting to. There is something to say for original content, and Google knows. If your content goes up first and is indexed first by Google, chance are you're going to rank better than the scrapper sites.
If these sites really bother you, you can submit a Copyright Removal form here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice, but a legal order to remove the content would be better (acted upon faster). Filing copyright infringement reports for eBay listings was very effective for me, but my experience with Google is limited. Let us know if you do file and how the process goes.
Generally speaking, it's actually pretty good that site are linking to your posts. If you are extremely uncomfortable with any particular site's backlink(s), you can use the GWT Disavow tool https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487/?hl=en&authuser=1
Good luck, and let us know what you do.
-
Yes agreed but if you are seeing that scrapers sites outrank your sites in SERPs in that case you should fill the form.
Thanks
-
Thanks for the reassuring response, Alick.
Based on what you're saying (and that post from Niel Patel) it's a waste of time to even fill out Google form (these sites are not outranking us). Agree?
-
Hi ,
First let Google know about this by using this form @ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6bp1SOVmy60QjkF0Y/viewform
Second I would like to tell you that its myth that scrapers will hurt your Site. Scrapers don’t help or hurt you. Do you think that a little blog in Asia with no original writing and no visitors confuses Google? No. It just isn’t relevant.
To know more on this please visit below URL
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What do you think about SEO of big sites ?
Hi, I was doing some research of new huge sites for example carstory.com that have over million pages and i notice that many new sites have strong growing for number of keywords and then at some point everything start going down (Image of traffic drop attached) there are no major updates at this time but you can clearly see even on recent kewyords changes that this site start loosing keywords every day , so number of new keywords are much less that lost keywords. How would you explain it ? Is that at some point when site have more than X number of indexed pages then power of domain is not enough to keep all of them at the top and those keywords start dropping ? Please share you opinion and if you have any experience by yourself with huge sites. Thank You very appreciated 2LC3AxE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | logoderivv0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Google favoring old site over new site...
Hi, I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com. His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links. Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed). It's been about 2 weeks now and no change. Has anyone experienced something like this? If so, what did you do (if anything). Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Duplicate Content Help
seomoz tool gives me back duplicate content on both these URL's http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php I want to use http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ as this just look nice & clean. What would be best practice to fix this issue? Kind Regards Eddie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
How can scraper sites be successful post Panda?
I read this article on SEJ: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/scrapers-and-the-panda-update/34192/ And, I'm a bit confused as to how a scraper site can be successful post Panda? Didn't panda specifically target sites that have duplicate content & shouldn't scraper sites actually be suffering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0