Sabotaging Websites - A New Way To Do It
There are many ways to sabotage a website, but today I found out that one of my websites was sabotaged in a way that I had never seen before.
A few months ago, I started a new, content-rich website. It included about 100 articles. Like I often do with a new website, I got a few backlinks to the site, then left it to age a few months before seriously promoting it.
Today I returned to that website to find it had some serious ranking and indexing problems in Google. I tried to figure out what was going on and found that someone had used a very creative way of sabotaging the website.
What this person had done was take almost every single article from my website, and submitted them to many article directories. However, the articles were submitted with his byline and with a link to his websites! Since then, many other websites had syndicated these articles from the article banks - and all of these syndicated articles were linking to his websites.
Now, it looks to Google like my website is simply a copy of free articles available in article directories, with little original content. In short - little original content = not worth indexing or ranking. What's more, this person's website is getting credit for all of these articles, as most of the copies on the web are linking to his website.
Normally, I don't care much if someone copies from my websites. I think Google is pretty smart about it, and as long as your content is cached first, you should be alright most of the time. However, in this case, with so many copies of most of the articles from my website, and all of them attributing authorship to someone else, it's a big problem. It's an even bigger problem for brand new websites (like mine) as these sites will not yet have earned much trust or authority in Google.
I can't think of what I can do about this other than start from scratch, which is very disheartening (and expensive). If anyone has any thoughts about how to deal with this, I'd appreciate the input. And of course, in the future, I will be more vigilant about checking for people copying my websites.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:57 pm that sucks. Google claims they watch to see where content existed first, and they give that site credit, but it is probably easier said then done....
April 24th, 2008 at 3:28 pm Send the article sites a DMCA take down request and send one to Google too. They take copyright pretty seriously. It's worth a shot.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:50 pm Thanks chrispian - I had thought about doing that. The problem is that lots of other websites, presumably in good faith, have used these articles, which they obtained from the article sites.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:09 pm I can't think of what I can do about this other than start from scratch - I would do that - this also happen to my websites. Good Luck When I was a young man, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn’t want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work - George Bernard Shaw
April 25th, 2008 at 1:03 am If it's at all related to search, marketing, domaining, or internet marketing in some way, let me know and I'll throw some links your way. I'd also file a DMCA with Google. Matt Cutts' latest post has the info on how to do it.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:27 pm @Gab - thanks so much! Actually, it's a health related website, but I greatly appreciate your offer. I'm also going about trying to get the content removed. If it doesn't work out, I'll file a DMCA.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:56 pm Don't people have anything better to do than screw up other peoples sites? It sure pisses me off. Care to provide the name of his/her website? I'd like to put the word out about this individual.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:12 am I wouldnt be overly concerned about getting them removed. Get the original article submission sites to change the linkbox so future links will be yours. Secondly review where your articles are posted using copyscape and decide which websites are relevant and worth the effort of asking for the linkbox to be changed. Use a DMCA to force the issue if necessary. Finally check your website carefully. Somehow i doubt this is truly giving rise to an indexing problem all by itself.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:49 am @Don - I thought long and hard about outing the person. I decided not to in the end, as I wanted the article to be more about what to watch out for rather than getting back at someone.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:52 am @Barry - Thanks! I'm starting to go through this process now. I think that why it's hurting is because the site is so new; if someone did this to an established site, it wouldn't work. But I will look for other issues.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:24 am You can go in and change the articles up a bit. It will also get google to recrawl and see some fresh stuff. We do it all the time with some sites that are in top10 with 4million serps. Just rewrite some or post some new content in between the old.