web of fraud! do any of you bloggers know something about this?
I found an amazing web of fraud this weekend: there is a site that is only dedicated to copying all my blogs and that adds the keywords 'online stock trading' to the posts. The site is "www DOT streetstockinfo DOT com" . I guess they are trying somehow to trick the search engines. By digging some more, I've only found that it is a privately registered site. I've written to the domain registrar to see if they can do anything about. The real scary part is that I've searched references to that site and found "fdafct DOT org" pointing to it (and the domain registration email from that site is not valid). And looking up that last site returned tons of links. So there is a web of fraudulent links out there.
Have you ever experienced anything like this? Is there anything one can do about this?
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thanks for reading Canadian Money Review
9 comments:
update: the registrar for the offending site (namecheap.com) came back and said they've contacted the owner to see what's happening
Meh, going through the offending host's registar won't do much good -- they'll just mail the domain's owner (who obviously knows s/he's stealing content) and say "um, somebody thinks you're ripping them off, be nice and stop it, m'kay?" The recipient will politely nod and keep on going.
Contact *your* host (in this case, Blogger). They're owned by Google, who are very interested in catching and stopping SEO scumbags like these. Remember, these jerks are ripping *you* off (by taking content hosted straight off Google's own gear, no less), mirroring your content without permission, and using it to scam the Google search engine (among others).
You can also "poison the well" -- it's very likely the actual "slurping" of content against you is being done in an automated fashion, so publish a nonsense story (labeled as such, in a way that's obvious to a person but not a program) every once in awhile. Write it yourself (you don't want *your* site to get blacklisted for posting "randomized" content either) but don't spend much time on it. Write about flowers. Or hamsters. Or dust. Or your favorite passage from your favorite book. Completely *skewer* their SEO efforts by including stuff that'll throw off their "finely tuned" keywords (Google will probably lower the rank of pages that link to a blurb about flowers with link text of "investment choices in the American recession").
Just a thought, but you'll have more luck going through Google/Blogger.
If you can afford a lawyer, of course, you can subpoena the domain registrar to "unhide" that information and sue the bastards yourself once they've been unmasked :)
Good luck with it!
Check out my sister's blog on this issue at http://pootandcubby.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/i-must-have-made-it-to-the-big-time-interwebs/
There is a program called Copyscape you can use. But overall the internet is ripe for copy abuse.
Sorry. That HTML address is
http://pootandcubby.wordpress.com/
2008/02/01/i-must-have-made-it-to
-the-big-time-interwebs/
And of course, they ripped off the post complaining about their plagiarism. D'oh!
willfe: I like the idea of writing about flowers!
Pharmadaddy: thanks for the link!
CC: that is really funny indeed
willfe, here's Blogger policy on copyright content on other hosts:
"Is someone copying your Blogger-hosted content to another domain or website?
Unfortunately, Blogger will be unable to act as your copied content does not exist on our servers. We strongly recommend contacting the offending blog's hosting provider for further assistance with these matters."
more about Google: here's their official process: http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html
(basically you have to write to them)
I'll see if I have the desire to follow-up ...
Yea, there are a few "splogs" that scrape MDJ's feed without permission also. I think they do it partially for the track back to the post and hoping for some clickthroughs. I basically screen them with my spam plugin so that they never get posted on my site.
From my knowledge, u are doing everything you can by contacting the host, owner, and adsense.
Good luck!
FT
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